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Singing is Praying Twice: Poems
by Marianne Peel
Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024
139 pages
To Order: Shadelandhouse Modern Press
Reviewed by Cynthia T. Hahn (hahn@lakeforest.edu)
Marianne Peel's poetry has an intensity that makes it difficult to put down. What is compelling about the reading experience of Singing is Praying Twice is how Peel manages to circumvent the more predictable chronological telling of the experiences of childhood, motherhood, losses and death, by hooking us with startling images. She deftly intermingles unexpected notes of tragedy and ecstasy, in a constantly revolving palette of the senses. Her visual range of color description keeps us engaged, as does her specific olfactory reminiscence, quoted bits of dialogue and music, evocations of touch, from rough skin to soft wool, at times calling for a sixth sense spiritual transcendance, while grounded in a world bound by sun and sky, water and wind, linking conventional tradition and ancestral rite to the atemporal or surreal. This volume is Peel's second work of poetry, after No Distance Between Us: A Journey in Poems (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2022) another poetic volume that utilizes a first-person narrator to make connections to a variety of Others in distant places and ultimately, to reconnect with herself.
This 2024 volume, Singing is Praying Twice, is structured narratively by a moment of reflection conveyed in a single, haiku-like poem invites us into each of the four chronologically-ordered sections. These initial short poems convey an image whose meaning is uncovered in the sequence of free verse or prose poems that follow, as in the entry poem to the third section: "Long before her birth/I touch my daughter's strong hand/arabesque of dawn" (59). This gentle image is surprised by the first poem of the section, "Gestation interrupted", in which "hieroglyphic clots […]/have dislodged themselves from some dark place inside me. /A broken wound on the wall of my prehistoric cave." (61) and followed by other moments of prayer (to the Goddess Parvati) for "angels" to rescue her child, perhaps the one who is born in "Lamentation": "… your face blue/as the umbilical cord. A robin's egg blue that startled/even the midwife catching you in her palms." The emphasis on precise color underscores the artist-poet, teaching her 2 day-old daughter at the art fair, "marmalade orange,/sangria red, sea serpent green/ jellyfish purple, black-eyed Susan yellow." ("Introduction to Art 101, p. 71). The entry poem cited above then becomes first illumined in this section as daughter is imagined in "a round dance, a wreath of bangles./She pirouettes between heaven and earth/navigates a labyrinth of carousels/ choreographs her own geometry." (72). And later in a much darker poem: "You have abandoned the shoreline in search of deeper waters. […] You are all moon and fleshy star, a throbbing constellation./ You arabesque between starfish and seahorses." ("This is Your Water Waltz" (89-90).
In addition, what links one poem to the next in this volume is a line of music, a quoted or referenced musical piece as in the poem "Hope": "Aaron Copland's Appalachian spring/when the flute and oboe vine their way/up a white picket fence on a bluegrass meadow" (16), or a reference to Uncle Johnny's accordion, to Baba, "an obbligato soprano", to music-making made sacred ("I genuflect before the sheet music on the piano", 18), or "Full Moon Drum Circle" in which the "tree frogs who churn out the bass line" are coupled with white-haired women who drum "until their pulses become one frequency/[…] synchronize" (20). Beginning with the collection's title, loosely evoking St. Augustine's understanding of sung prayer as highly meaningful, we too are invited to resonate with the string of memories laid out, sometimes sonorously linked and repeated as a kind of auditory incantation: "No counting. No need to think. To overthink. No need […] ("Trying to Remember, 110).
Uncovering and navigating uncomfortable, sticky familial relationships, the poet or first-person narrator, calls forth objects, cites words and actions that activate all the senses, as in the first poem, "Lessons from the Cellar and the Front Porch", a text that turns around the young girl's often conflictual relationship with her mother, the harshness of it later tempered by the balm of music: "Mama wouldn't allow no bras in the house. /Waste of hard-earned money, she would say./So I'd bind my chest with rags,/rags smelling of pine and lye." By the end of the poem, mother asleep, the girl, in moonlight, "this arc of song/erupting from my mouth/… and my dancing just couldn't contain my bindings" (2-3). And again, in the second section, she continues to explore familial conflict with a teenager's defiance: "My father banned books in the house/when I turned fourteen"; the poet continued to read in clandestine fashion, "flashlight on the book I'd scoundreled home", and "Wondered […], Wondered […], Wondered […]" until "I woke." ("Surfacing," 39-40) The importance of story reading as a path to growth, and then telling, underscores the theme of awakening to the adult mind.
From the outset, the title of this volume emphasizes singing, in a literal sense but also metaphorical, highlighting the oral power in the telling of the stories contained within. This is coupled with the idea of prayer we may read as an attempt, via poetic recounting, as a way to achieve reconciliatory understanding, or at least acceptance of the complexity of our emotional connections. Peel prepares the reader by foreshadowing painful memory, as in "Wound" (50-51), wherein the neighbor's "strapping" boy unsuccessfully tempts the poet at age five to fall into an icy "hell" tunnel of winter snow, and then succeeds in summer, convincing her to put her small hand against the blade of the push mower he wields.
Peel often dates her poems, following striking memories from early childhood to adulthood. In the first section, she allows us to connect to the little-girl perspective of parents, here presented as strange but intimate. In "My Ozzie and Harriet, Circa 1965", she writes of her father in his reclining chair, a Detroit Free Press covering him with comic strip characters: "The newspaper crackles, puffs its ink/out and in. My father snores into/the news, his exhale decayed with possum/tail soup from a roadkill cookbook" (53), while her mother "shrinks into her little girl voice, begging for a drinking buddy", in hand, a "small steel flask" (52). Family encounters, relayed from one poem to the next, are littered with details easy to envision due to their visceral nature, alternating between a recall of gritty moments and atemporal, lyrical moments of natural beauty.
The accumulation of tangible elements serves as an effective rhetorical device; Marianne Peel revels in enumerating and connecting the natural world, through sky and plant imagery, to food and the domestic sphere, often compiling a list of images or intoning repeated thoughts that lead us to catch our breath in surprise and take us to the hard edge of deep emotions, as when we discover the autistic child, the one whose world is full of the dictionary, and silent signs, the poet using an anaphoric "She doesn't" to start almost each line in the prose poem, "Dictionary Girl, They Call Her" (75-76), to emphasize her unchildlike countenance: "She doesn't daydream about butterfly wings or the color of the sea bottom. […]."She doesn't wear mismatched socks"; "She doesn't slouch in the La-Z- Boy chair" but rather "sits still as the sky" practicing hard multiplication tables. "She can't tell anyone that the 12s are hard. Really hard. Just too hard." The four daughters that eventually emerge in the text and become estranged with their mother due to separation from their father exhibit relationships turned to "acidic accusation,” and symbolized by a saved umbilical "cord stump", a remnant of lifeline connection, one of many "scars" that link to the wounds evoked in the first two sections of the volume ("Accusation", 82, "Severed", 83).
The sensitivity to living things and their fragility is a theme aptly recounted by the autistic daughter, at the end of "A Loveliness of Ladybugs": "Nothing ever dies, she tells me/ if we tend to the business of living." (84-85). This longer third section which includes themes of birthing, connection, separation, loss, reconciliation and attempts to enter the world of the other, culminates in the apparition of the grandchild, the future hope: "She carries my name into startling galaxies she creates", the wonder of continual renewal amidst the acceptance of aging: "I want my granddaughter [...] to connect […] these liver spots/ with a bright magic purple marker." ("Mapping our universe", 100-102).
The fourth and final section confronts and describes mortality in terms of actions; a car accident, the search for a word, literal and metaphorical disappearance, lost memory fused with the act of collection, "like rattling through a pantry full of mason jars unlabeled […]. A blasphemous space to pray, in this place of cobwebs and creaks." ("Trying to Remember", 109). Remembering at a later stage of life is expressed in the active metaphor of "crocheting" and her father as caregiver "changes her Depends", while the poet grapples with the desire to retain a happy final image of her mother at a meal, "drunk-happy" on Red Lobster clam chowder and the "sweetness of vermouth" ("My Mother Doesn't Realize She's in Hospice," 114). In the poem-letter to her deceased mother, "Sacrifice" that ends with the book's title, "Singing is Praying Twice," sensory evocations of piano music, her mother's tidy red wool coat, and Gregorian chant in a Slovak church are paired with snow and maple syrup, icicles, floating incense and flight. Death too is likened to an activity of presence, drinking tea in the parlor, dancing and singing with "melodies made of marjoram, with harmonies made of steam escaping the teapot." ("When I Try to Talk to the Dead", 117). Final recollections of the deceased and the clutter of things remain, while her mother is evocatively reimagined as activity ceased, "a hive of dusty bees gone still" ("Incantation," 119) or a "charcoal of dust" in a gift of Autumn leaves saved in a shoebox ("I Am Still Waiting", 123).
Finally, as the poet's father begins to forget her, the poet asks to be remembered by the "you" continually addressed in this volume, conjured up in a feast of indulgent delicacies in "Death Wish" (129-130): "Scoop on the decadence of gravy. […] Compose a spanakopita galette." This artist-author encourages us to delight in the colors she will have "left behind" in planted perennial "purple crown of snow crocus" and "laughing face of butterfly jonquil", reminding us of the hope of nature's sacred renewal, while this poetic telling of life and death, of family broken and bound, of powerful spirit singing, sates us. We retain images both heavy and light, from a "red deluge" of blood (61) and the welt caused by "her mother's black onyx ring" (27) to "warm huckleberries collected in coffee cans", Nana's afternoon smell of damp "earth after the sun" (7) and "sunset-orange poppies." ("The Color is Never Blue", 128).
This highly compelling collection of poems infuses the reader with original imagery and reconnects us to the range of emotional highs and lows that bind us to human experience. We are drawn to read "twice", once filtered through her eyes, and once again through our own.
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