Peter Clenott

In ambitious and dextrous poems employing a variety of formal guises, Mary Meriam creates for us an impressionistic yet incisive vision of love and loss in her powerful new collection, My Girl's Green Jacket. Recalling the sonnets of John Donne and the religious ballads of Christina Rossetti, Meriam's assured poems pulse with a channeled intensity, leading us as readers through an emotional and intellectual landscape . . . A collection as brilliant as it is emotionally nuanced, My Girl's Green Jacket offers us a complex imaginative mirror to hold up against our current reality. -Stu Watson editor of Prelude Lush, acrobatic, heartbroken, and witty by turns, or all at once, Mary Meriam's poems pack plot, memory, landscape, and longing into firm and elegant shapes. To call this work formally accomplished isn't sufficient. Meriam's lyricism is nervous and incandescent; her poems coruscate and spin. My Girl's Green Jacket honors not only the urgency of desire but also its mercurial restlessness. Poetic forebears ranging from Sappho to Hopkins, from H.D. to Marilyn Hacker, turn out to be not only generative models but also anchors in a world of relentless change. -Rachel Hadas author of Poems for Camilla The poems in this extraordinary collection shimmer with light and color, vibrate in the imagination with almost hallucinatory effect. They reach the reader, through the intimate short-cuts of the senses, so powerfully that the gorgeous, daring language feels inevitable-just right-even as it leaves objective order behind . . . Poem after poem in a rich variety of expertly handled forms-"The Mockers," "Ars Poetica," "Dusk," for instance-reveals the nature of love: its capacity to sow guilt, regret, longing, obsessive memory, fantasy; its tendency to inhabit every thought, experience, and sensation, and not only with our permission, but at our insistence. -Rhina P. Espaillat author of And After All and Agua de dos ríos/ Water from Two Rivers Mary Meriam's My Girl's Green Jacket is rich in description, rhymes and rhythms, bedecked in vivid color and emotions undimmed by the veneer of irony that shellacs so many contemporary poems. Like the moon she describes in "It Gets Very Dark until the Moon Rises," Meriam's songs, stories, prayers, fairy tales, ghazals and love-cries shine, grow, and give the dark a dream. -Joy Ladin author of Fireworks in the Graveyard This stunning collection of verse by Mary Meriam presents a palette of poems in various hues and forms . . . a spectrum of color reflects this poet's sense of loss and longing through a synesthesia that helps us hear, taste, and feel pigmentation as thought and emotion . . . Meriam notices the world quietly, yet vibrantly, alive to its potency, and we savor it too, dazzled by the poet's keen, discerning eye. -Janice Gould author of The Force of Gratitude Awe is equal parts nightmare and pleasure. Awe, in the hands of a poet, is exquisitely and horrifyingly impassioned. Mary Meriam's My Girl's Green Jacket writes the labor of our awe. Meriam stealthily interrogates our humanity by way of near-perfect poetic form . . . Meriam writes: "Nothing normal has ever happened to me." I say: Thank God. -kathryn l. pringle author of obscenity for the advancement of poetry