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Incarnadine: Poems
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2013)The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
-from “The Troubadours etc.”
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America’s most ambitious poets.
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
-from “The Troubadours etc.”
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America’s most ambitious poets.
72 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 2013
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2745 people want to read
About the author
Mary Szybist
8 books59 followersMary Szybist is the author of a Granted, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College and lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 229 reviews
June 6, 2016
Here, There Are Blueberries
When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.
Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?
Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets.
Here in this meadow, we open our baskets
to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them,
berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers.
What taste the bright world has, whole fields
without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds
swelling at the edges of the meadow. And for this,
I did nothing, not even wonder.
You must live for something, they say.
People don’t live just to keep on living.
But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.
November 1, 2013
It is smart of Mary Szybist to begin her collection with a poem called "The Toubadours Etc.," and with the opening line: "Just for this evening, let's not mock them." It self-consciously addresses a contemporary audience that I think Szybist suspects is choking on its own post-modern jadedness and so she preemptively implores us mildly not to mock. Fair enough -- this is a serious poet with a serious subject: revisiting the Annunciation and repurposing that heavily-fraught scene for some of her other preoccupations (being confronted by evil-doing (i.e. kids thrown from a bridge by their mother) that forces the poet to question her faith even as she herself seems to want to have a child but is also considering aging/mortality and whether she can live up to her own expectations of motherhood). Szybist is true to her word and doesn't ever engage a mocking tone in her book and I am not about to sully the water by bringing in such a tone in my brief comments on this book. There is something cringingly embarrassing after a while, though, about the idea of conceiving a child being on par with Mary's (her namesake's) conception of the Lord, Jesus Christ. So there is that burdensome "etc." in the title that seems to want to have it both ways -- don't mock me; but yeah, I get that we're late in the poetic tradition and belief in Christianity isn't necessarily the structuring principle of that tradition anymore, etc., etc., etc.. I think that self-conscious unease with tackling such an emphatically traditional Christian subject in a 21st century context is best handled in poems where Szybist deploys unconventional forms (i.e. "Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle" -- an abecedarian little gem; or the concrete poem "How (Not) to Speak of God;" or a second-by-second storyboard poem like "To Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove;" or a whole new form altogether like "Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me" that then writes simultaneously as corpse, hair, skull, dirt, dust, etc.) -- the "etc." energy of the 21st century moment gets absorbed by the playfulness of the form while allowing the poet to still honestly engage her religious subject matter. In other poems, the Jorie Grahamesque alteration between short- and long-lines cascading down the pages are done competently, but as a non-believer I feel like Mary is sometimes getting carried away and things can start to feel stagey (the angel Gabriel taking his lines from Nabokov's Lolita and Kenneth Starr's report?!? Too staged, I'm afraid.) I also couldn't shake the feeling while reading the volume that Szybist and Colm Toibin at some point must've been in conversation with one another about their respective Mary projects -- their revisiting Mary's life seems to be in conversation with one another. (Well, okay, maybe that conversation is only in my head, but it nagged me a lot while reading this volume.) Not that they arrive at similar places in how they see Mary, by any means, but rather the techniques in some of Szybist's prose sections sounded incredibly similar in intention and effect (this part is from the poem "Entrances and Exits": A few hours ago, the 76-year-old woman, missing for two weeks in the wilderness, was found alive at the bottom of a canyon. The men who found her credit ravens. They noticed ravens circling--). I don't know -- ravens as dark angels that could easily be Gabriel approaching the Holy Virgin I guess doesn't herald a joint project; it's probably just that they share a similar subject matter rather than a stylistic sensibility. Bottom line after reading this volume in one evening: this is a serious volume by a seriously talented poet; but if you're a non-believer, like myself, you might find the preoccupation with the Annunciation scene overwrought and unconvincing as a viable poetic terrain, especially in order to structure the whole volume.
October 5, 2014
“All you can do is fail,” said Mary Szybist about the challenge of measuring herself against the ideal of the Virgin Mary.
“There’s something profoundly inhuman about her. She is valued because she is a mother and because she is a virgin. And I am not either. So how do you make your way in the world as a woman when you are not aspiring to and cannot be valued for either of those and do not want to be valued for either of those?”
Szybist, who won a National Book Award last year for “Incarnadine,” was my guest for “The Life of a Poet” at the Hill Center on Sept. 17. A video of our conversation — her first appearance in Washington since winning the NBA — has just been posted. . . .
Click here to read the rest of this piece at The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...
“There’s something profoundly inhuman about her. She is valued because she is a mother and because she is a virgin. And I am not either. So how do you make your way in the world as a woman when you are not aspiring to and cannot be valued for either of those and do not want to be valued for either of those?”
Szybist, who won a National Book Award last year for “Incarnadine,” was my guest for “The Life of a Poet” at the Hill Center on Sept. 17. A video of our conversation — her first appearance in Washington since winning the NBA — has just been posted. . . .
Click here to read the rest of this piece at The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...
December 26, 2015
Wow. Wow wow wow.
I did not think I was going to enjoy this as much as I did, as her last collection, Granted, was a bit of a hit or miss for me. But this. Wow... just wow.
I find it difficult to articulate just WHY I adore this so much. There were a few in here that just completely and utterly punched me in the gut. Namely, "An Update on Mary" was so heartbreaking. Overall, this collection was so personal, so illuminating, so vulnerable and beautifully written and set up, picking from across all kinds of spectrum and integrating into a cohesive, and awe-inspiring theme.
Just wow.
I did not think I was going to enjoy this as much as I did, as her last collection, Granted, was a bit of a hit or miss for me. But this. Wow... just wow.
I find it difficult to articulate just WHY I adore this so much. There were a few in here that just completely and utterly punched me in the gut. Namely, "An Update on Mary" was so heartbreaking. Overall, this collection was so personal, so illuminating, so vulnerable and beautifully written and set up, picking from across all kinds of spectrum and integrating into a cohesive, and awe-inspiring theme.
Just wow.
August 8, 2016
One of those books that invites endless re-reading, it is both contemporary and timeless in its vast reach.
June 5, 2023
Annunciation in Byrd and Bush
(from Senator Robert Byrd and George W. Bush)
The president goes on. The president goes
on and on, though the senator complains
the language of diplomacy is imbued with courtesy …
Who can bear it? I’d rather fasten the words
to a girl, for instance, lounging at the far end of a meadow,
reading her thick book.
I’d rather the president’s words were merely spoken by
a stranger who leans in beside her:
you have a decision to make. Either you rise to this moment or …
She yawns, silver bracelets clicking
as she stretches her arms—
her cerulean sky studded with green, almost golden pears
hanging from honey-colored branches.
In her blue dress, she’s just a bit of that sky,
just a blank bit
fallen into the meadow.
The stranger speaks from the leafy shade.
Show uncertainty and the world will drift
toward tragedy—
Bluster and swagger, she says,
pulling her scarf to her throat as she turns,
impatient to return, to the half-read page—
He steps toward her.
She pulls her bright scarf tight.
For this, he says, everybody prayed.
A lot of people. He leans on a branch,
his ear bluish in shadow.
If I say everybody, I don’t know if everybody prayed.
I can tell you, a lot prayed.
How still she is.
(Her small lips pursed, her finger still in the pages,
her eyes almost slits as they narrow—)
Nothing matters in this meadow.
There is a girl under pear trees with her book,
and it doesn’t matter what she does or does not promise.
There’s no next scene to hurt her.
Not even the pears fall down.
I want the words to happen here.
God loves you, and I love you, he says.
Not far beyond his touch,
a wind shakes a dusting of sunlight
onto the edges of pears.
I’d rather think some things are like this.
The water’s green edge dissolves
into cerulean, cerulean pearls
into clouds; the girl’s unsandaled feet
into uncut fringes of grass—
I don’t need to explain, he says
(his sleeves swelling in a nudge of air)
—but the highest call of history,
it changes your heart.
She looks down: her finger in her book.
(from Senator Robert Byrd and George W. Bush)
The president goes on. The president goes
on and on, though the senator complains
the language of diplomacy is imbued with courtesy …
Who can bear it? I’d rather fasten the words
to a girl, for instance, lounging at the far end of a meadow,
reading her thick book.
I’d rather the president’s words were merely spoken by
a stranger who leans in beside her:
you have a decision to make. Either you rise to this moment or …
She yawns, silver bracelets clicking
as she stretches her arms—
her cerulean sky studded with green, almost golden pears
hanging from honey-colored branches.
In her blue dress, she’s just a bit of that sky,
just a blank bit
fallen into the meadow.
The stranger speaks from the leafy shade.
Show uncertainty and the world will drift
toward tragedy—
Bluster and swagger, she says,
pulling her scarf to her throat as she turns,
impatient to return, to the half-read page—
He steps toward her.
She pulls her bright scarf tight.
For this, he says, everybody prayed.
A lot of people. He leans on a branch,
his ear bluish in shadow.
If I say everybody, I don’t know if everybody prayed.
I can tell you, a lot prayed.
How still she is.
(Her small lips pursed, her finger still in the pages,
her eyes almost slits as they narrow—)
Nothing matters in this meadow.
There is a girl under pear trees with her book,
and it doesn’t matter what she does or does not promise.
There’s no next scene to hurt her.
Not even the pears fall down.
I want the words to happen here.
God loves you, and I love you, he says.
Not far beyond his touch,
a wind shakes a dusting of sunlight
onto the edges of pears.
I’d rather think some things are like this.
The water’s green edge dissolves
into cerulean, cerulean pearls
into clouds; the girl’s unsandaled feet
into uncut fringes of grass—
I don’t need to explain, he says
(his sleeves swelling in a nudge of air)
—but the highest call of history,
it changes your heart.
She looks down: her finger in her book.
Read
December 5, 2013Meg Storey (Editor, Tin House Books): The best reading experience I had in the month of February was a live reading. Mary Szybist’s second poetry collection, Incarnadine: Poems, was released by Graywolf this month, and since Szybist is a local poet (and Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop faculty member and a personal friend), I had the pleasure of attending her book launch at Powell’s. Hearing her reinterpretations of the Annunciation and her observations of motherhood (there is a particularly haunting poem about a mother who threw her two children off a Portland bridge) in Mary’s own lovely voice was a wonderful way to experience the work. But the next-best thing has been lingering over them at my leisure, and I encourage you to do the same.
December 4, 2014
A perfect book.
---
"The Troubadours Etc."
Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We've followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
lounging sheep, telephone wires,
yellowing flowering shrubs.
Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled--
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.
When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of their numbers.
And when we stop we'll follow--what?
Our hearts?
The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
quietly to myself in my blue dress,
a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
though cloudless.
At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
even as it swells--
Just for this evening, won't you put me before you
until I'm far enough away you can
believe in me?
Then try, try to come closer--
my wonderful and less than.
---
"The Troubadours Etc."
Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We've followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
lounging sheep, telephone wires,
yellowing flowering shrubs.
Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled--
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.
When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of their numbers.
And when we stop we'll follow--what?
Our hearts?
The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
quietly to myself in my blue dress,
a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
though cloudless.
At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
even as it swells--
Just for this evening, won't you put me before you
until I'm far enough away you can
believe in me?
Then try, try to come closer--
my wonderful and less than.
October 1, 2013
I picked this up because it was longlisted for the National Book Award in poetry in 2013.
Religious under/overtones? Yes, although I'm not always certain if they are favorable or critical. The poet Mary plays with the idea of Mary in a myriad of ways, and the poems are emotional and musing. I enjoyed them even if I wasn't always sure I knew what was going on. There is also a lot of bird imagery, which makes me think of a certain Catholic I know.
Religious under/overtones? Yes, although I'm not always certain if they are favorable or critical. The poet Mary plays with the idea of Mary in a myriad of ways, and the poems are emotional and musing. I enjoyed them even if I wasn't always sure I knew what was going on. There is also a lot of bird imagery, which makes me think of a certain Catholic I know.
June 10, 2014
I never thought anyone would rival Mary Oliver - but Szybist's poems were equally beautiful and moving.
April 18, 2022
"and he came to her and said
the Lord is
troubled
in mind
be afraid Mary
the Holy
will overshadow you
therefore
be
nothing be impossible
and Mary said
and the angel departed from her”
the Lord is
troubled
in mind
be afraid Mary
the Holy
will overshadow you
therefore
be
nothing be impossible
and Mary said
and the angel departed from her”
June 19, 2017
This is so beautiful, in so many ways. Szybist is a new favourite poet of mine, now that I have just finished both this book of poems and Granted, her first published collection. These are modern contemplative pieces that are well introduced by the two quotes Sybist has included at the beginning:
How apt those quotes are, since in the poems, Szybist draws our rapt attention to the intersection of flesh and spirit, and the inevitable constellation of feelings born there: hope, longing, fear, dread, the breathless fluttering of hearts — the particulars depend upon who is meeting whom, of course.
The icon she has chosen as her central motif, around which the poems are wrapped smoothly as ribbons around a May pole, is the Annunciation. (The Annunciation, in brief: The angel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary to announce to her that she has been blessed and favoured by God to bear Jesus, the Son of God, and that this will happen through the intervention of the Holy Ghost. For the full text, see the Holy Bible, KJV, Gospel of Luke, 1:26-38.) The most beautiful and famous visual depiction of this scene is Botticelli’s Annunciation, painted in 1608 and housed at the Uffizi, a reproduction of which graces the cover of this book.
Of course, in the Bible, Mary responds demurely and graciously to Gabriel’s announcement, accepting her role as handmaiden to God. But Szybist wonders what a woman in such a position might really be thinking. What didn’t she say? That book never got written. This deeply personal response to the ineffable and mysterious, which we encounter not only in the kingdom of Heaven but also here on Earth, is Szybist’s realm of exploration, and it’s a trip worth taking with her. It is helpful to have some supplies in your backpack, including knowledge or resources about art history (European, Christian, Middle Ages through Renaissance) and the Holy Bible (KJV). There are quite a few references to both.
Szybist’s style is quiet (except when it’s not) and subtle (mostly) and funny and tender and biting, and brimming with what I can only think to call a kind of perpetual yearning, but without clumsy pity or insincere remorse. She does not venture only into the religious mystical realm, but broadens her theme to include other encounters that fill us humans with equal parts awe and trepidation, wonder and terror, and always always longing to know more and to understand better.
I love The Lushness of It, which begins:
This poem is the last in the book. I was delighted to find myself arriving here, floundering in a wild sea and aching to be embraced by its tentacles, from such a lofty starting place, where Heaven and Earth overspill each other’s bounds and angels ascend and descend with alarming regularity.
I cannot say which poems are my favourites, since I liked every poem in this collection. Anyone who reads poetry knows that this is rare. Also, like many other fine poets I read and enjoy, I am absolutely sure I missed some of the subtler and finer things she was saying. Never mind. I plan to reread and reread this one, so I will notice more as I spend more time with these poems.
Here’s a brief quote from Knocking or Nothing, which is definitely a favourite (along with Here, There Are Blueberries), despite my not having favourites:
"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation." — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
"Repose had again incarnadined her cheeks." — Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd
How apt those quotes are, since in the poems, Szybist draws our rapt attention to the intersection of flesh and spirit, and the inevitable constellation of feelings born there: hope, longing, fear, dread, the breathless fluttering of hearts — the particulars depend upon who is meeting whom, of course.
The icon she has chosen as her central motif, around which the poems are wrapped smoothly as ribbons around a May pole, is the Annunciation. (The Annunciation, in brief: The angel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary to announce to her that she has been blessed and favoured by God to bear Jesus, the Son of God, and that this will happen through the intervention of the Holy Ghost. For the full text, see the Holy Bible, KJV, Gospel of Luke, 1:26-38.) The most beautiful and famous visual depiction of this scene is Botticelli’s Annunciation, painted in 1608 and housed at the Uffizi, a reproduction of which graces the cover of this book.
Of course, in the Bible, Mary responds demurely and graciously to Gabriel’s announcement, accepting her role as handmaiden to God. But Szybist wonders what a woman in such a position might really be thinking. What didn’t she say? That book never got written. This deeply personal response to the ineffable and mysterious, which we encounter not only in the kingdom of Heaven but also here on Earth, is Szybist’s realm of exploration, and it’s a trip worth taking with her. It is helpful to have some supplies in your backpack, including knowledge or resources about art history (European, Christian, Middle Ages through Renaissance) and the Holy Bible (KJV). There are quite a few references to both.
Szybist’s style is quiet (except when it’s not) and subtle (mostly) and funny and tender and biting, and brimming with what I can only think to call a kind of perpetual yearning, but without clumsy pity or insincere remorse. She does not venture only into the religious mystical realm, but broadens her theme to include other encounters that fill us humans with equal parts awe and trepidation, wonder and terror, and always always longing to know more and to understand better.
I love The Lushness of It, which begins:
It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you —
not that it wouldn’t reach for you
with each of its tapering arms.
You’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus … (p. 64)
This poem is the last in the book. I was delighted to find myself arriving here, floundering in a wild sea and aching to be embraced by its tentacles, from such a lofty starting place, where Heaven and Earth overspill each other’s bounds and angels ascend and descend with alarming regularity.
I cannot say which poems are my favourites, since I liked every poem in this collection. Anyone who reads poetry knows that this is rare. Also, like many other fine poets I read and enjoy, I am absolutely sure I missed some of the subtler and finer things she was saying. Never mind. I plan to reread and reread this one, so I will notice more as I spend more time with these poems.
Here’s a brief quote from Knocking or Nothing, which is definitely a favourite (along with Here, There Are Blueberries), despite my not having favourites:
Knock me or nothing
ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish.
clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
Let them. Let the fans whirr.
All the similar virgins must have emptied
their flimsy pockets, and I
was empty enough,
sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn,
dumb as the frost-pink tongues
of the unpruned roses.
When you put your arms around me in that moment,
when you pulled me to you and leaned
back, when you lifted me
just a few inches, when you shook me
hard then, had you ever heard
such emptiness? … (p. 62)
January 12, 2018
“What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.”
This single, direct line feels like the most essential in the collection. It’s almost an echo, or an answer of sorts, to Mary Oliver’s famous question in The Summer Day:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I was lucky enough to take a class with Mary Szybist when I was a student at Lewis & Clark College, so I appreciated having the chance now to read her own poems many years later. Incarnadine puts into context why she chose the poets for class that she did, and enriched my reading of these pieces.
Incarnadine is a mixed collection, anchored by the theme of the Annunciation, traversing a variety of forms and topics from high culture to pop culture. While some experimental forms worked better than others, I was floored in particular by the concrete poem How (Not) to Speak of God, its sun-shape on the page nearly glowing with the radiance of the language. (I was pleased to learn in the notes at the end of the book that this poem was actually painted onto the ceiling of the Pennsylvania College of Arts and Design.) I remember learning from Mary about concrete poetry and wondering who could ever possibly pull off one of these types of poems — it turns out, of course, that’s she’s skilled enough to do it!
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove, also experimental in its own right, was another standout. The first half of the piece leads the reader along the minute-by-minute experience of watching birds. (Something I too love to do.) But there are all these slippages back into interiority, as the mind so often leads us, and the voice in the poem confesses, “Two flap / their wings without leaving their branches and / I am tired / of paying attention. The birds are all the same”. We then wander into thinking about a lover and wondering if it is even possible to access the feelings of the past, whether we can remake them, whether love is better at a distance or even possible from afar. What I admired about this piece was how true to life it feels — watching something, often out in the world or in natural places and finding yourself captivated with the magic of it, but then feeling the mind inevitably intrude and you find yourself drawing back into the ever-editing landscape of your past lives. There’s also, naturally, the constant desire to project our lives onto the natural world around us, which this poem works through too — the clustering, ceaselessly energetic pigeons never alighting anywhere for long, and the lone dove (a symbol, of course) being impossible to find in the swirl of all of the feathers.
Other exceptional poems, or ones I at least noted, were: Here, There are Blueberries, which you find is dedicated to her father at the end, and gestures towards the enoughness of the world; To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary, an excellent prose poem and where that first line I quoted comes from; and The Lushness of It, a final poem about an octopus. (Just read it!)
This single, direct line feels like the most essential in the collection. It’s almost an echo, or an answer of sorts, to Mary Oliver’s famous question in The Summer Day:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I was lucky enough to take a class with Mary Szybist when I was a student at Lewis & Clark College, so I appreciated having the chance now to read her own poems many years later. Incarnadine puts into context why she chose the poets for class that she did, and enriched my reading of these pieces.
Incarnadine is a mixed collection, anchored by the theme of the Annunciation, traversing a variety of forms and topics from high culture to pop culture. While some experimental forms worked better than others, I was floored in particular by the concrete poem How (Not) to Speak of God, its sun-shape on the page nearly glowing with the radiance of the language. (I was pleased to learn in the notes at the end of the book that this poem was actually painted onto the ceiling of the Pennsylvania College of Arts and Design.) I remember learning from Mary about concrete poetry and wondering who could ever possibly pull off one of these types of poems — it turns out, of course, that’s she’s skilled enough to do it!
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove, also experimental in its own right, was another standout. The first half of the piece leads the reader along the minute-by-minute experience of watching birds. (Something I too love to do.) But there are all these slippages back into interiority, as the mind so often leads us, and the voice in the poem confesses, “Two flap / their wings without leaving their branches and / I am tired / of paying attention. The birds are all the same”. We then wander into thinking about a lover and wondering if it is even possible to access the feelings of the past, whether we can remake them, whether love is better at a distance or even possible from afar. What I admired about this piece was how true to life it feels — watching something, often out in the world or in natural places and finding yourself captivated with the magic of it, but then feeling the mind inevitably intrude and you find yourself drawing back into the ever-editing landscape of your past lives. There’s also, naturally, the constant desire to project our lives onto the natural world around us, which this poem works through too — the clustering, ceaselessly energetic pigeons never alighting anywhere for long, and the lone dove (a symbol, of course) being impossible to find in the swirl of all of the feathers.
Other exceptional poems, or ones I at least noted, were: Here, There are Blueberries, which you find is dedicated to her father at the end, and gestures towards the enoughness of the world; To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary, an excellent prose poem and where that first line I quoted comes from; and The Lushness of It, a final poem about an octopus. (Just read it!)
January 6, 2014
In such a short book there is a vast variety of wonderful poems and presentation (structure). In many ways you have a feeling of new discovery as read and savor each page. I particularly liked the poems spiritual themes that are checkered throughout the book. I can certainly see why this book was so acclaimed receiving the National Book Award for poetry last year. And too think this is only Ms. Szybist's second collection of poetry!
Read
January 16, 2025Second read through. There's 4-5 poems and a handful of lines that just bowl me over. Antique queen/ the night dreams on / here are the pears I have washed for you, here the heavy winged doves / asleep by the hyacinths / are lines I remember almost every day. :')
Some of my favorites:
Annunciation in Nabkov and Starr
Update on Mary
Hail
Entrances and Exits
Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
Some of my favorites:
Annunciation in Nabkov and Starr
Update on Mary
Hail
Entrances and Exits
Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
September 21, 2020
i do not
"get": poetry
but/however/conversely
i (eye) think
it is fun when
the formatting gets
(is) weird.
"get": poetry
but/however/conversely
i (eye) think
it is fun when
the formatting gets
(is) weird.
August 4, 2018
I know I don't read a lot of poetry, but can it be a coincidence that two of my favourite poets are now named Mary?? I think not.
did-not-finish
May 4, 2022C/W:
DNF at 75%
I wasn't clicking with the poems in Incarnadine but was trying to give the collection a chance to wow me when I came across an entire poem that's just body horror. This topic is a hard no for me and was the sign I needed to finally set this collection aside.
DNF at 75%
I wasn't clicking with the poems in Incarnadine but was trying to give the collection a chance to wow me when I came across an entire poem that's just body horror. This topic is a hard no for me and was the sign I needed to finally set this collection aside.
March 27, 2021
Pretty good, I like several of the ideas and references in this book. The annunciation motive was interesting though I’m not quite sure its meaning within the whole frame of this book.
April 28, 2024
I like this a lot, but I am suspicious of it. I'm going to let it sit for a bit and then return to it, for sure.
June 11, 2014
Despite the acclaim and accolades this book has received, I'll be blunt: this is the type of poetry I hate. I could picture the reading in the same breathless fashion as other readings I've attended, for some reason a type of verse rooted in spiritual meanderings and over-annunciation of everything--a fitting descriptor, given the collection's usual subject matter.
These poems are trying too hard to be poems. The fact that they've been published in so many places makes me worry for the state of contemporary poetry. There's nothing outright offensive about them--they're clearly put together with an attention to theme and craft and the thought that powers them--but they ring of an affected intellectual elevation. These are poems for poets, not for people, and so often they seem to be trying very hard to say nothing.
There are certainly good bits in the collection: the pieces working with quotation struck me as the most innovative and enjoyable. 'Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr' rang true from a recent reading of Lolita; 'Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle' was a beautiful example of found language giving meaning to everyday life. But so often in these poems, Szybist seems to reach extraneously for 'meaningful' last lines, to the extent that it often seems incredibly forced and put on. I noted this specifically in the poem 'Update on Mary', with the closing lines 'The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them even by moonlight. Tonight,/ until bedtime, we can let her have those.. This isn't an altogether offensively affected line, but in a litany of other examples, it came off as grating, and this kind of 'powerful conclusion beyond its means' was repeated all throughout the book.
Despite the supposed spirituality or meditation in this book, most of the poems left me cold, and I'm fully willing to concede that's because this just isn't 'my type of poetry'--it evoked a similar reaction as my reading of Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog, which was showered with similar acclaim in the same time-frame. I have no interest in old poets writing poetry for the sake of poetry, no interest in conceited delivery and purposeless traipses through language. I concede that other, more gentle consumers of the medium might enjoy this book, but it certainly wasn't for me.
These poems are trying too hard to be poems. The fact that they've been published in so many places makes me worry for the state of contemporary poetry. There's nothing outright offensive about them--they're clearly put together with an attention to theme and craft and the thought that powers them--but they ring of an affected intellectual elevation. These are poems for poets, not for people, and so often they seem to be trying very hard to say nothing.
There are certainly good bits in the collection: the pieces working with quotation struck me as the most innovative and enjoyable. 'Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr' rang true from a recent reading of Lolita; 'Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle' was a beautiful example of found language giving meaning to everyday life. But so often in these poems, Szybist seems to reach extraneously for 'meaningful' last lines, to the extent that it often seems incredibly forced and put on. I noted this specifically in the poem 'Update on Mary', with the closing lines 'The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them even by moonlight. Tonight,/ until bedtime, we can let her have those.. This isn't an altogether offensively affected line, but in a litany of other examples, it came off as grating, and this kind of 'powerful conclusion beyond its means' was repeated all throughout the book.
Despite the supposed spirituality or meditation in this book, most of the poems left me cold, and I'm fully willing to concede that's because this just isn't 'my type of poetry'--it evoked a similar reaction as my reading of Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog, which was showered with similar acclaim in the same time-frame. I have no interest in old poets writing poetry for the sake of poetry, no interest in conceited delivery and purposeless traipses through language. I concede that other, more gentle consumers of the medium might enjoy this book, but it certainly wasn't for me.
December 4, 2013
Quiet. The rhythm of these poems didn't take immediately. Szybist's subjects are different than what I would typically read and probably even contemporary poetry as a whole. Her point of focus would seem to be religion and at first glance is, with half of the collections titles starting with 'Annunciation' after the Annunciation, yet is never so obvious. Once the rhythm caught, around the second half of the book, I found myself going back to the first part to re-read those poems I took nothing away from to find more was there.
Her other subject is herself and her relationship to the world. She displays her influences in epigraphs and notes in the back, all of which are interesting and wide-ranging from Duchamp to medical journals to transcripts of G.W. Bush. I love where she comes from and how she writes, how she makes the reader stop and listen. Though there are times that she lost my attention. Then, there are at least 2 or 3 poems that arrested me. Where as I read I second-guessed her and was wrong and was so happy to be wrong and when I finished the poem the only thought I could think was, Fuck was that honest.
As a whole, the book could've used some cuts or re-working or more focus. It just didn't feel as complete as it could have and the consistency of the poems' quality was lacking. I was reminded of her first book when I finished it thinking, Her next book will be better. And this one is better and there are poems here that soar while others fall flat.
July 16, 2015
The strength of Incarnadine as a collection is a result of the muscle of the individual poems. There is an almost dizzying array of forms collected here, each uniquely suited to the content of the poem. Some poems are fairly traditional, with mid-length lines. Other poems are prosaic, with lines stretching across the wide page. One particularly spectacular poem, “How (Not) to Speak of God,” features eighteen lines arrayed in a starburst pattern with no beginning or ending. These varied forms give the impression that Szybist composes carefully, with an ear and an eye towards doing what is best for the poem.
Though Incarnadine is only Szybist’s second collection, it’s clear her poetic muscle is strong. As postmodern as some poems are, Szybist’s subjects are universal and timeless. Through lyrical language and disquieting hybridity, these poems draw the reader in and force them to rethink what they thought they knew. Even if a third collection takes another decade, there is enough to unpack and experience in this book to last until then.
Though Incarnadine is only Szybist’s second collection, it’s clear her poetic muscle is strong. As postmodern as some poems are, Szybist’s subjects are universal and timeless. Through lyrical language and disquieting hybridity, these poems draw the reader in and force them to rethink what they thought they knew. Even if a third collection takes another decade, there is enough to unpack and experience in this book to last until then.
January 14, 2021
Mary Szybist keeps circling back to this strange picture: a virgin, visited by an angel, told that she will bear the Son of God.
She dives into Mary and Gabriel, yes, but she also thinks about the grass under their feet, likens them to pairs of animals (whale and gulls), and meditates on change, motherhood, and love.
Some of these poems had a vastness, a deepness that I could glimpse and yet not see the bottom. Some I want to savor, let melt in my mouth, marinate until it becomes something new. Some didn't catch; a lot didn't. But lines like "Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself" and "I am tired / of paying attention. The birds are all the same / to me." snag at me in the ways that the best poetry does.
Yay for thoughtful meditative poetry on religious topics that aren't afraid to go other places. The poems I can't stop thinking about: "Long after the Desert and Donkey" and "To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary."
She dives into Mary and Gabriel, yes, but she also thinks about the grass under their feet, likens them to pairs of animals (whale and gulls), and meditates on change, motherhood, and love.
Some of these poems had a vastness, a deepness that I could glimpse and yet not see the bottom. Some I want to savor, let melt in my mouth, marinate until it becomes something new. Some didn't catch; a lot didn't. But lines like "Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself" and "I am tired / of paying attention. The birds are all the same / to me." snag at me in the ways that the best poetry does.
Yay for thoughtful meditative poetry on religious topics that aren't afraid to go other places. The poems I can't stop thinking about: "Long after the Desert and Donkey" and "To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary."
Read
January 5, 2015"Szybist’s style is unusual in its imaginative force she invigorates the genre of devotional poetry with an uncommonly light yet vibrant touch. Conflating the mythic and the ordinary, the carnal and the sacred, her poems consider the range of ways in which annunciative confrontations that transform the spirit and heal the soul might occur in modern life." - Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Princeton, New Jersey
This book was reviewed in the November 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1DmxE5i
This book was reviewed in the November 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1DmxE5i
July 19, 2016
One of my contemporary poetry Bibles, and Gorgeous as ever.
(read: June 2013, May/June 2015, July 2016. Perfect summer-season read when one is surrounded by a Pacific Northwest blaze of green and aqua colors and flowers in blue, red, pink, yellow."
Really one could about turn to any page and pick something worth underlining, fit to write down in one's notebook and press to one's chest to savor the lushness of it.
"Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.
What I want is what I've always wanted. What I want is to be changed."
(read: June 2013, May/June 2015, July 2016. Perfect summer-season read when one is surrounded by a Pacific Northwest blaze of green and aqua colors and flowers in blue, red, pink, yellow."
Really one could about turn to any page and pick something worth underlining, fit to write down in one's notebook and press to one's chest to savor the lushness of it.
"Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.
What I want is what I've always wanted. What I want is to be changed."
May 8, 2013
I'm giving her a four because she deserves it, not to indicate that I loved the book. She writes with extreme density and, simultaneously, light-heartedness. There's a texture to this book that isn't normally found in contemporary poems. She is unafraid of saying her piece. The religious thread that runs through the book is at once distrustful and accepting. Though she may or may not have found peace, the collection asks you to be at peace with the liminality of faith.
August 5, 2015
A beautiful, creative, and sometimes jarring (in a good way) collection. The book is centered around poetic meditations of the Annunciation, all of them beautifully crafted. Some of these captivated me, others not so much. In general I preferred the non-Annunciation poems in the collection, many of which capture the sense of "nothing" at the heart of "everything." A very good read.
April 14, 2019
I first read one of Szybist’s poems on the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem a Day” page. I don’t remember the poem, but apparently I liked it well enough to order her book. What I do remember is that from the poem I had read, I had thought Szybist was one of the “old, dead poets” the Academy features on weekends. The author’s photo on the back, however, indicated she was neither old nor dead. This is a good thing as it means, Lord willing, that she will have plenty of time to write more poems, something she is clearly gifted to do.
Mary Szybist has a familiarity with religion. Her language, and occasionally her subject matter, is reminiscent of the Catholic church. I didn’t find the book as easy to get into as expected, as I think many of her strongest poems come nearer the end. Her devastating poem “Cathars, etc” and “Here, There are Blueberries” are two of my favorites.
July 8, 2017
Szybist take the holy mother and sets her down gently in poem after poem. Her attention turns to the moment of holding oneself motionless, to the moment before Mary responded to the angel, the moment before touch. These are lovely, challenging poems full of blue and light.
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