Enter Water, Swimmer: Poems

by Mary Morris

Overview

These poems travel physically and emotionally, addressing the human condition through evocative language. “Enter Water, Swimmer” and you will be steeped in various manifestations of this world and beyond, daring to take on diverse realms of women, belief, culture, and ethics.

Day One

You slipped through me,
not by me.
How could I have known
I would fall through these waters
into the country of us?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680031553
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	07/28/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	78
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

MARY MORRIS received the Rita Dove Award and New Mexico Discovery Award. Published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Columbia Review, Arts & Letters, and numerous other literary journals, she has been invited to read at the Library of Congress and consequently aired on NPR. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

I

Leave the Barren Fields 1

Hymn 2

Cerebral Hemorrhage, Five Months with Child, Christmas Eve 3

Sonogram 5

The Flower-Crowned Skull of Saint Valentine 6

Day Two 7

Sharm El Sheikh 8

Yellowtail 9

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer 10

Girl Reading a Letter, Vermeer 11

Boy 12

The Ear Is a Bony Labyrinth 13

Acupuncture with Dr. Hao 14

Dr. Suto's Herbs 15

Atlas 17

Moustafa 18

After the Diagnosis 19

A Love Supreme 21

St. Vincent Infirmary 22

Organ Donor 24

Living with the Dead 25

Baggage, Prophet 26

II

Widow Fetish 29

Union 30

Of the Holy Ghost 31

Sightings from the Hungry Ghost Camp 32

Addiction 33

Triad for the Body 34

Vespers 36

On Each Horizon at Dusk 37

Photographer of War, Sebastiao Salgado 38

Anatomy 39

After Each Act of Grief 40

Fellini's Roma 41

Train to Rome 43

Szymborska 44

Astrology the Reading 45

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird 47

Milagros 48

Searching for God through the Medina After Dark 49

Flight 387 50

In the Center of Night, the Heart Slips Out of Its Socket 52

Invocation 53

Lucy 54

Fidelity 55

Notes 56

Acknowledgments 58

About the Author 60

Editorial Reviews

A gathering of imaginative poems that are playful and true to themselves. Someone says poets are people who cannot say one thing at a time, and here we have a distinct example of that ability. In one poem, Saint Valentine is seen as the patron saint not only of love, but epilepsy, the poet having a vested interest in both. In another, the poet turns our attention from the aftermath of war to the artistry of a sushi chef who can turn a shrimp into a hummingbird, and out of a piece of yellowtail fashion miniature horses that 'cantered around our hands.' Mary Morris is not surrealist either, but she produces one vivid leap after another. An acupuncturist takes the speaker's pulse 'as though searching for a forbidden city on a map.' And in a tribute to Szymborska, 'little crosses' become 'warplanes in their hangars put to rest,' an image so rare and true, the Polish poet herself might have envied it. These poems are full of eye-opening surprises.”

—Billy Collins
Poet Laureate of the United States 2001-2003

"Mary Morris weaves together timeless thematic strands—the body, landscape, loss, motherhood, identity—in poems that are as deftly crafted as they are startling in their imagery. These poems possess a good strangeness I can't shake, and they share a fascination with newness and invention, both within the physical body and beyond it. As Morris writes in the opening poem: 'Enter water, swimmer.../Be sworn in.' Indeed, this book is one I'm delighted to enter again and again."

—Maggie Smith
author of Good Bones

"A poem is often a balancing act between beauty and truth-telling, between elegance and plain-spokenness. Mary Morris' poems manage to do both. There's an austerity to Morris' poetic speech that is part of their painstaking honesty. She is as meticulous when invoking spiritual mysteries as when she describes the difficulties of human relationship, or contemporary political realities. Morris is a poet in full possession of her craft. These poems manage to be at once humble and celebratory, forceful and beautifully-made. This is a big-hearted, honest, and often gorgeous book."

–Tony Hoagland
author of Application for Release from the Dream

“Mary Morris's debut collection unleashes the forces of Eros against those of Thanatos—love and all that is sustaining versus utter annihilation. You can sense Frida Kahlo as the presiding spirit here; the poems arrive with totemic intensity, a surreal mash-up of animism, mysticism, cultural traditions, and harrowing autobiography—all in the service of a spirit seeking remedy for a vulnerable body in a hazardous world. As in Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme,’ the work here is psalm-like, exultant, a blooming outward from suffering via the ‘blue throat of joy.’”

—Thomas Centolella
winner of the American Book Award

“A distinguished collection, written with style and confidence. The poet continually introduces elements that surprise. The collection as a whole speaks with authority.”

—X. J. Kennedy
winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime service to poetry

From the Publisher