Mary Szybist

Granted Mary Szybist

Using natural, biblical, and classical imagery, these poems explore the difficulties of faith and love?particularly the difficulties of their expression, their performance. Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic?however quirky or strange.

"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition?to overcome by the quietest of means."?Donald Justice

In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light?

When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.
When I am tired of only touching,
I have my mouth to try to tell you
what, in your arms, is not erased

"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition?to overcome by the quietest of means."?Donald Justice