There is no living writer we need more these days than Marianne Boruch. The sometimes urgent, sometimes devastating arc of Grace, Fallen from that feels, at once, to follow the trajectory of this century with its great disappointments and to simultaneously speak of the past—“however once / you were”—with a lingering sense of time’s inevitable passing, bears out this necessity.
More vulnerable, angrier, and more helpless than we’ve heard from Boruch before, this speaker is held in startling stasis—still and stilled. In “A Moment,” the poem that begins the collection by pulling back, waiting, leaning forward uncertainly, we find a speaker hesitating when she’s “usually / right there rushing in, because the world / requires that.” Grace, Fallen from begins in surrender, “giving up / everything, to anyone, / just like that,” but even that yielding, too, carries with it something of a gift to both reader and speaker.
Those familiar with Boruch’s work are no strangers to the ways in which “to repeat / is to remember. To remember is to go / on and on.” We expect and, expect or, depend here on the rhetorical devices of repetition. The reiteration she makes possible, that echo, never fails to surprise, in part because such a reliance makes the poem do what it is about and in part because her restraint exemplifies how her use of repetition has evolved. Throughout Grace, Fallen from, Boruch attends to an object or an idea “that repeats / and stills,” allowing the poems to look back on their subjects, to trace them over and over until the thing at hand becomes memorized by the hand. Such attention takes on the quality of the telescopic, at times, the microscopic at others—the smallest thing made enormous by what shining a light on, or away, can accomplish. In Boruch’s poems, precision becomes everything.
Despite such accuracy or because of it, pressure bears down on this book. Of course, there is still joy, still playfulness, still the landscape we expect from Boruch: that pine “in a narrowing / swatch of pines” or “the lettuce barely / fringe in the raised bed.” Certainly, we anticipate Boruch’s world where something’s always askew, a stitch unraveling. There’s “a robin somewhere, a half-hearted / che er ily” who’s “lost the middle kingdom/ of his song” or “That sparrow on the trash again, one / leg missing.” As much as we recognize, through Boruch’s careful eye, the strangeness of living, something has changed: “Because winter, I think. Or because / my here to your not-here. / Or because we are older.”
Here, like never before in Boruch’s poems, “Days / unwind themselves.” In “The Park in November,” “nothing opens why she / stays up front, why he’s over / into the back now. Why the car / is a room in a house / neither imagined. Why breath / goes white on a window if certain / things cannot be said.” Life seems nearly impenetrable to this speaker and its “beauty’s / not generous / isn’t anything / but its passage.” By the time we reach the book’s third section, we think we may understand why:
Will it end, this
looking back? From here, it’s another shiny
ravaged century after another,
but back there, in a house or two: a stillness,
a blue cup, a spoon, one silly flower raised up
from seed.
Not only does this world remain more impossible, but the speaker, herself, grasps on to her own sense of disappearing: “The way, coming / out of surgery, I saw a room / slow and fill itself in / richly, without me.” And yet the poem itself emerges as a salve to quiet some of the fear, to calm some of the disturbance: image after glorious image, that sacred line, that unbelievable thing called memory—what’s called up and back, not quite remembered—made and made—in the rooms these poems insist are possible.
To read Grace, Fallen from is to enter a holy place. Her most accomplished collection yet, it ensures that the challenge Boruch has set for herself—to make poems, after all—lets us press our ears to the doors where “something / unearthly, not human yet, / filtering down the shaft” might recall who we were “so many light years ago.” Grace, Fallen from keeps revealing itself, its echo echoing, its imprint–“the print of a print of a print”—present in the present where the future will pick it up, make it legend, and not forget.