Mary Catherine Harper
Cornerstone Press, 2022.
$20, 174 pages, paper
Reviewed by Mark B. Hamilton
Throughout this fine collection, Mary Catherine Harper explores a labyrinth of ambiguities: between abstractions and the tangible, between personal memories and the public moment, between constructs of language and their mirrored context. Her words navigate those fragile views of mortality along the high lines of mountains—as in “Eclipse of the Past:” “I was born to the planet of now. / I’ve witnessed a full eclipse of the past. / [… ] I was born to the story of the lost. / I became the keeper of memories” (7). Mary Catherine Harper’s voice is authentic, sensitive, and perceptive as nuanced tones and variations cling to surprising images, changing with alterations of time, and with the contours of experience. Like a rock climber, her poems juxtapose the ethereal with the physical. A fault in the rock becomes an opportunity for the climber. The fear of falling becomes a flight to experience the real, her “own heart pumping / against the end of the world” (17).
Saturated with the past, the reader senses her loss, grief, and doubt as a threshold, a geography that leads “to the other side of time” (33). Humbled by the limits of her own personal story, the ego vanishes, yet the questing mind remains ever present and tentative, as in “The Spider Talks to Her Creation” (50).
I wait for your foundation to crumble enough
to crack
into your basement
to thread some wild fragile leavings there
across the bottom
of your world.
In other poems, like “The God’s Stone Mouth” or “Trusting the Serpent,” Mary Catherine explores an uncertainty of chance with the fearlessness to know. In others, like “Potter’s Retreat, Poet’s Ground,” there is the growth into wisdom, as “words that buzz loose in the mouth” (69) transform motion into a clarity of the moment.
Each page of The Found Object Imagines a Life expresses a fine-tuned intuition, with a flint-edged insistence on recognizing the truth. Well-chosen section titles specify the seeker’s progression through this labyrinth of knowing. At times, a precise sequence accumulates into near mysticism, such as in the five poems from “Earning Apocalypse”: “Turning to Stone,” “Tracking the Grizzly,” “To Shed a Skin,” “On Seeing Beyond,” and “To Belong.” Together, they lead through disparities to a unity of freedom, traveling within the subjective of self toward a reflection of the divine. In excerpts from “To Belong,” we perceive this magic manifest as a necessity to absorb that which lies beyond: “the green man at our door, his bold invitation / […] / his magic, to tune us to our planet / […] / our species … / to be implicated, to belong” (96).
Mary Catherine Harper’s The Found Object Imagines a Life: New and Selected Poems brightens with each additional page, her words dancing amid the dance of bees, offering hope that beautiful flowers will continue to bloom on that far and welcoming hill.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Mark B. Hamilton considers himself an environmentalist and a neo-structuralist, working in forms to transform content. Recent work appears in Weber—The Contemporary West, North Dakota Quarterly, Chrysanthemum, Urthona Magazine, UK, and Duc Le: Bi-lingual Poetry Journal , US/Vietnam, along with a new poetry volume, OYO, The Beautiful River—an environmental narrative (Shanti Arts, 2020-2021). Previous poetry includes an award winning chapbook, “Earth Songs,” a second chapbook, “100 Miles of Heat,” and the poetry volume, Confronting the Basilisk.
Mary Catherine Harper is a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award winner and OAC poet-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center of Cape Cod for the summer of 2019. She has made her home at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in Ohio, where she co-organizes the yearly SwampFire Retreat for artists and writers at 4 Corners Gallery in Angola, Indiana. A two-time winner of the 2018 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals. Her Some Gods Don’t Need Saints chapbook was published in 2016, and The Found Object Imagines a Life was published by Cornerstone Press in September 2022.
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