the whole Marie

Barbara Maloutas

Selected for the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by C.D. Wright

 

“A nexus of associations, psychic and social, binds olive groves to the pretext of a headache to the thinnest dresses. A record of solitary activity, mental and physical, disrupts a life in a context where a succession of bookkeepers is recalled, a car is towed, an easement is sought, and tourists are studied, because sooner or later, one is one. Patient, curious, ranging, the whole Marie has a personality. And it is artifactual. And wondrous. Its ambiguities are offset by its concretions. Vice versa. She carries her ‘one time camera.’ Finally, the breath is her guide.” —C.D. Wright, judge of the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

 

“The poems of the whole Marie pull one into worlds richly realized, recognizable, puzzling. Their language works to try to find things out (‘this learning to tell me’). How does one learn to tell time and to know it as both present and mythically ancient? How does one know the unfamiliar familiar—a grove of olive trees, a painter like Delacroix, mistaken directions, skeletal sponges, her tone of voice? The attentiveness of this work is assured, intelligent, and a source of joy for the reader. In Greece, where a number of the poems are located, the details are ordinary and also freighted with mystery, a mystery created by space in the middle of a line, by unusual parentheses that reverse subject and object, by unfinished sentences, by images that are wonderfully unexpected, wonderfully apt:

old men shimmer against themselves

take care stumble transient almost

an eagle grows in mid-air a(way) from the canopy

time seems short for sure (there's the beach)”

—Martha Ronk

 

“Author, authority . . . English provides no label for the feminine voice. Barbara Maloutas' the whole Marie is naming itself from the inside out. It is watching and being watched—tearing down and holding on: ‘somebody dies briefly sometimes is (tomorrow)’—all the openings that present themselves, close themselves: ‘a relentless repetition of cutting and healing; where is unconsciousness kept;’ The words trail off and spiral away with a finity that toys with transcendence: ‘in the shadow of myself I see from above and at see-level; to find harmony in all this radial beauty.’ This is a strong, feminine voice that takes no direction and seems to be headed in all, at once. Everyone should start adjusting, and adjust, and adjust; or, as Maloutas puts it: ‘who let her through the gate / with loose bags like these . . . .’ —Diane Ward