Grace, Fallen from (review)

In this, her sixth collection, Marianne Boruch turns her attention to the possibilities for discovery built into the everyday world. The poems in Grace, Fallen from, bring to light the nearly unbearable tension between the world as we know it and the world as it deserves to be known. In "Light on Four Sides," one of the longest poems in the book, the speaker describes a Chicago apartment in which she admits to sleeping too much because "to sink down into its depth / was to find things. The end of the world, / for instance." In one such dream, the speaker joins a line of strangers outside a library and helps to pass books from hand to hand so that they can be buried safely in the ground before the apocalypse. About the immediacy of her dream-world, she says:

                  (I swear to this,to all dreams, the way they startleand stay and enter the bodyas oxygen carried in, to carry offsuch dark).

The complex meaning of "to carry off," which hints at both "to carry away" and "to pull off," exemplifies Boruch's deft handling of syntax throughout the collection, a handling that allows small words to encompass vast ideas.

Another frequent trope is the act of reading, especially how our ability to read words affects our ability to read the world. In one poem, a doctor announces, "I read bodies"; in another, the speaker watches a small boy learning to read and wonders at the power of written language to make and remake the world. Writing also appears in several poems, although Boruch is much less interested in lofty statements about creation than in the consequences of the physical process of hand on page. In "Think of the Words," she writes:

lost to a short pencil, words like milk,eggs, celery, gone to the library, Ifed the cats all flying through it,using it up.

In a world that refuses to hold still, we owe our attention to even the smallest, most humble instruments of our will. Yet the speaker admits that contemplating the pencil requires her "to write a few more words / to wear it down" as she revises her previous thoughts. At the end of the poem, she considers the phrase "I'm all worn out," which she heard adults say during her childhood, and realizes that she never before had applied the phrase to "life that / seems unstoppable. Never the small, / hard eraser at the end of it." Our lives, like the work of the pencil, are made up of seemingly inconsequential acts that lead to the inevitable "small, / hard eraser" of death. Without belaboring the comparison, Boruch suggests that we use our lives and pencils more mindfully.

At the same time these poems seek to understand the world as it is, they acknowledge that the world changes more quickly and more frequently than we possibly can perceive. In "day six" of "Seven Aubades for Summer," the speaker mourns the form itself, "its little scheme to stop time / almost stopped." The inevitability of change is less problematic than our inability to understand that it is happening. In "Ladder against a House," the speaker contemplates how the ladder, dimly seen in the dark, serves as a model either "of the will to go up or / no, earth is / the welcoming place." This leads her to think about the ladder's origins as a tree in a forest harvested by men with saws. Yet her fantasy is unsatisfying because "The tree's / lost all contact with its story." Without that contact, an awareness of what one has been transformed from and into, transformation loses its meaning. Those seeking to transform the world or themselves should remember that true transformation disallows consciousness of what was before or after.

In "The Deer," the speaker looks up from her typing and sees a group of winter-thin deer browsing for food outside her window. She continues to type as she thinks about the deer, their search for food, and their possible familial relationships until, "mid-sentence," she looks up...