May Day by Gretchen Marquette (2016)

The first book by Minnesota poet, Gretchen Marquette, published in 2016.

Poetry Review:  May Day by Gretchen Marquette is poetry as poetry should be; these are the kind of poems that could save poetry and make it something that real people actually read. I'm so sad that poetry has become a secret society, only read by other poets (& perhaps their patient friends), or by students required to attend readings by faculty poets. If not for slams, the word "poetry" might've been lost altogether.

The poems in May Day place cut-glass emotions into sharp relief against nature, talking in ways that speak to all of us, mind to mind, heart to heart, history to history. With an image of a wounded doe in mind, she writes: "Don't think on it too long./I know I'd die of thirst," and we're deep in Marquette's history, a history that mixes with ours, parallel or shared. These poems dance through time, of childhood, parents and brothers, of lovers lost and summers past, a memory sleeping in the next room. A poem about a turtle on a road cries out, "Why aren't I your wife?" There are deer, forest, fishermen, cows, hawks, dogs, and they morph at any moment into this instant's thought: Iraq, hurt, the pain of love, loss. Poems with blood, with subtle undertones of Plath (almost unavoidable, I think), and moments touched by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), that Marquette has made all her own: "... my lost dolls,/your small guitar, and my broken horses." Her influences have been absorbed deep into the bones of these mature, well made poems. There are so many lines that just kill me: "You've got all the words/though I go on, fumbling./Let me learn another language" and "Spring has arrived./Let me not despair."

Without counting, more than half the poems in May Day are so powerful, so resonant, pointing the way to a book that could rip trees out of the ground. So what didn't I like? Sometimes it's a little too trendy, post-modernist for me: Gretchen Marquette is strongest when simply communicating through her exact and pointed images, stripped naked, without throwing in the requisite academic tropes. And there's also the occasional scientific factoids, dropped in like raisins, that I've also noticed in works by other poets, so it may now be a trend that's crept into the business. I may be wrong, my prejudice showing, but the best poems here come straight from Marquette's bones, without the stylish overlay that make them beloved of academics and journals (this is all from Lorca's "Play and Theory of the Duende," which I'm sure Marquette has read.) When she lets the duende break through, I'd put her words up against anyone writing today. The poems in May Day have a depth, a humanity, that is all too rare in our world. A second book by Gretchen Marquette is a necessity. [4 Stars]