The Book of Jobs
by Kathryn Maris
ISBN: 1-884800-71-8
paper, 49 pages, $14.95
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From Publishers
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Maris’ first outing explores not suffering (as in the
Biblical Job) but occupations: vocations, professions, trades, ways to work for
a living, and the nature of works of art. Her verbal flourishes fit the topic
well: “What is work anyway,” she asks, “but a turgid mirror//
whose revelations quiver/ in recalculation?”...Her urbane language keeps
its center in Manhattan, with side trips to the Netherlands, Greece, Italy,
Brazil: the poet also depicts museums and the family home, where she becomes
“mother to all that is bare, all that is gone”... Maris' verse has
the feel of charcoal sketches, well-defined and rapidly executed, with blank
space where the perceiver's eye can take hold.
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That Kathryn Maris has written a first book that feels as
assured as other poets’ third or fourth books; that she writes with wit,
grace, and heart in a beautifully spare style capable of effects at once lush
and harsh, sorrowful and satiric, passionately felt and contemplatively calm,
reveals a poet of highly original understanding who feels “The beating of
now, the caesura of tomorrow / That I hear in the day, in the dark, in
fear.” But even more impressive than these gifts is the
idiosyncrasy of her perceptions: like Cavafy, she stands at a slight angle to
the universe, as in these lines from “Greek Funeral”: “The vertical line that is Grandmother standing on her grave-to-be./ My mind extends the line to infinity. There she is: in the clouds and in the ground.” The
subtle strangeness of seeing her grandmother fuse with the horizon line, and the
visionary impulse to extend that line to infinity, plus the naturalness and
subtle musicality of her idiom, demonstrates this poet’s great formal
accomplishment and uniquely powerful sensibility.
—Tom
Sleigh
Between “the beating of now” and “the caesura of
tomorrow” lies possibility: realm of Hope, realm of Fear. With nimble
intellect and a vision at once acerbic, compassionate, ever-original, Kathryn
Maris gives resonant voice to the faceless many who have been variously broken
by loss and indifference in a world that justifies paranoia and is also a
catalyst for a wry, tragicomic wisdom. “No loss is mine, for there is no
me,” says one of the many anonymous witnesses here—witnesses to
their own undoing and to that of the anonymous others around them. The Book
of Jobs is the moving and increasingly persuasive testimony to that
collective vision. —Carl Phillips
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