Perhaps the Heart is Constant After All by Mary Dorcey (review)

Mary Dorcey is an accomplished poet; her sixth collection Perhaps the Heart is Constant After All shows her poetic maturity in its dedication to a central theme, its sense of rhythm, and in the arresting images of the poems themselves. It is a beautiful collection, and as most successful books demonstrate, its seeming effortlessness is testament to the work and skill behind the writing.

The title poem, the sole poem in the book’s first section, introduces one surprising variation on what Dorcey will name, late in the book, “the wonder of other.” Though the title suggests faithfulness, the poem embodies that faithfulness ironically: “it / makes no difference who we love. . . . It’s always the same love is / it not?” The title poem praises the constancy of feeling and sensation of the heart, not the object of affection—the emotions themselves, not those feelings directed toward one particular lover. Because the poem is phrased not in declarations but in questions, it ironically suggests the opposite; though “it makes no difference who we lust for,” the poem ends with the particulars of one affair—“a certain night, a scented // Road, the scarred river, the lamp-lit bridge”—and its hopes for eventual forgetfulness of “that lie” undercut the insistence that what matters is the feelings themselves, not the person or the betrayal. The “wonder of other” here is complex, a fitting beginning to a book that explores several “others.”

In a variety of voices and perspectives, Dorcey continues to present the “wonder of other.” The second section depicts a more traditional sense of sexual love, where the speaker begs “touch me with your eyes” and heralds the pleasures of the flesh, “my lips at your throat” and “your tongue [that] scrawls / the letters of your name.” In the beautiful lyrical fourth section (also the longest section in the book), the “other” is the poet’s dying mother; these poems chronicle that wonder with sensitivity and humor. The mother’s presence is so strong that it “gave existence to” even rooms and objects. While her mother is in a care facility, they continue to talk and bicker: “every so often you check me: that’s wrong / you say. It’s not, I answer.” In the next poem, the mother and daughter discuss the mother’s acceptance of her impending death because of a sense of purpose in her life: “A cog / in the wheel? I suggest. No—a link in the chain.” Death itself is figured as a sort of natural wonder in this section: “slow and steady as coal / shoveled comes the rasp of your breath // As you haul uphill a life’s last freight”; the mother in her moment of death is figured as “A small bird / testing the air for / a morsel.” The poems of the final section acknowledge grief and mourning, yet do so with a sense of wonder about it: “I see you as a bird— . . . I gaze at you / and marvel / that you ever / stood here, / wrong footed— / earth bound.” Even in the poem “Absence,” a catalog of ways the poet misses her mother, the tone is vibrant; written in the first person, and in the present tense, though it echoes with the idea of grief, yet the tone is not abject, but tender: “Have I said that I miss the touch / of your eyes? / And miss the way they turn from me / so that I can say look at me— / and wait until you do.”

The most innovative way Dorcey extends the theme is through her figuring of nature; she extols the “wonder of other” in the natural world, the way nature often connects, by way of image, to the “other” or beloved in the human world. In “Sepia,” for instance, a boat on the river captures the speaker’s attention and reminds her of her lover: “fading sunlight / stipples your hair.” In “Elm,” a poem in the section about...