May Day: Poems

by Gretchen Marquette

Overview

You arrive at my altar

with no idea

what it means to worship—to adore.

You haven't even learned it:

ecstasy and suffering

make the same face.

—from "The Offering"

May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love—losses that have left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also the wonder of the natural world: the deer at the edge of the forest, the dog reliably coaxing the poet beyond herself and into the city park where by tradition every May Day is pageantry, a festival of surviving the long winter. "What does it mean to be in love?" one poem asks. "As it turns out, / the second best thing that can happen to you / is a broken heart."

May Day introduces readers to a new poet of depth and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977399
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Gretchen Marquette has published poems in Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, and Tin House. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

I

Elsewhere 5

Doe 6

Prologue 8

Know Me 9

Prophecy 10

Colossus 11

Gregory 13

Andromeda 14

Painted Turtle 16

Macrocosm/Microcosm 17

I Know One Thing for Sure 18

II

Deer Suite 21

Trophy 25

Fisherman 26

Apart 27

Split 28

Lost 29

Montana 30

S = k log W 31

III

Want 35

A Poem about Childhood 36

Dear Gretel 37

Lament with Red Wall and Olive Tree 40

About Suffering 42

Childhood 43

An Orange 44

Why Loneliness 45

IV

What I've Learned about Cottonwoods 49

Boy 51

Styx 52

Translation 54

Red 55

Sketch for an Ode or Elegy 59

The Offering 60

A Cold Front 61

V

Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes 65

Figure Drawing 66

Despite 68

Deer through a Boutique Window 70

Song for the Festival 71

Mule Trail 72

Two Trains 74

May Day 75

Powderhorn, after the Storm 76

What We Will Love with the Time We Have Left 78

Editorial Reviews

05/16/2016
In this precise first collection, Marquette writes around the subject of loss—of brothers, lovers, and selves—as a means to understand its parameters and reach. Many poems embody a composed stillness that can feel like an observation made in anticipation of a drawing or painting. Marquette nimbly fashions arresting imagery: across the chest of a beloved “burst a sash/ of gold chrysanthemum,” while elsewhere the ventricles of an exposed doe heart suck a vivisectionist’s fingers “like women// or infants.” The poems’ speakers often lie frozen in wait, but the world that Marquette conveys is alive with wild and domestic fauna, totems of the blood and warmth of humans’ animal nature. Deer appear often, and memories of a familiar dog, trusting and unconditional, traverse the poems. Though the poems are narrative, the collection’s timeline is shuffled, making time itself into something circular and winding; one minute a brother is present, and yet the next “He was already less ours.” That nonlinearity can also be seen in a poem about the Andromeda Galaxy that shifts perspective from the sky to an open wound in the mouth: “The hole in my jaw has clotted/ with something from a star.” As she explores longing and want, Marquette deftly navigates the infinite as well as the small and local. (May)

Publishers Weekly

The poems [in May Day] plumb stories of lost love and anxiety, but each unearths glimpses of life’s wonder.” —Euan Kerr, MPR

“Lovely, dark, haunted, and haunting. . . . [Marquette’s] subjects—childhood memories of a brother and bracing visions of him on military deployment overseas; hungering, fragile love; the very nature of human experience—are so carefully handled, with such resolve and resignation. . . . Readers will remember this book.”—Publishers Weekly

"Startlingly original. . . . Marquette's beautiful and macabre images have the feel of a classic fairy tale."—Star Tribune

“Impressive.”—Largehearted Boy

“‘Why am I so ungainly with love / after all the loving I’ve done?’ asks Gretchen Marquette in this beautiful and disquieting new collection… The spring celebration of May Day becomes—and is simultaneously—the distress cry. It is as if in these pages Marquette has learned to wear ‘her heart outside of her body.’ The alertness, precision, and vulnerability of these poems are astonishing.”—Mary Szybist

“In this somber, well-crafted debut volume, Gretchen Marquette has constructed an arresting study of absence and loss… It is the true sign of a poet that, out of this landscape, Marquette has carved a commanding, deeply felt book.”—Lynn Emanuel

“May Day is a book of great delicacy of observation and noticing, but one that interrogates feeling with rigor, intelligence, and a radiant imagination.”—Mark Wunderlich

“In this delicate, soulful collection, the countless arresting facts of our universe—the size of galaxies, the nesting habits of cardinals, the cottonwood's serrated leaves—are felt as intimately as the loss of love or worry about a brother gone to war. . . Alternating between narrative prose poems and brief, breathier lines, the book plumbs the depths of love and grief with attention and tenderness.”—Mairead Small Staid, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI

From the Publisher