No Angels by Mary Makofske
Kelsay Books, 2023
Mary Makofske’s powerful new book of poetry, No Angels, leads readers to rethink ideas about our world, our actions, ourselves. We are human, neither fully angels nor devils, a condition that Makofske sees impacting every aspect of our lives and compelling us to look as much within as without for justice in a world where humans so often upset the balance.
In Part I, the poem “No Angels” resonates powerfully with what can be lost when we do not see each other as human. Recounting the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, the speaker claims, “No angel hovers” over Brown’s dead body nor “over Darren Wilson /… / wondering if the blood on his hands / belongs to him or the man he shot.” The speaker crucially turns the accusation about Brown being “no angel” towards others as well—Wilson, police, bystanders, protesters, news media, society—as complicit in allowing this to continue happening, allowing any misstep, even a stolen pack of cigarillos, to carry a death sentence. The speaker notes, “If you run, you look like prey. / If you attack, you’re a predator.” What recourse for Brown who, having “seen…an angel / chased by Satan and running for shelter / toward the face of God,” says, “Now I believe”? What accountability for an officer who “did not fire the gun. / The gun went off”? The speaker observes, “two wills, two worlds // there was a struggle,” and the losses are great. Those struggles and losses appear throughout the poems in this section.
Part II, with its topics ranging from family life to gardening and other encounters with the natural world, includes poignant moments such as the stage of a child’s life before language development in the poem “Speechless,” to the stage in “Handing Over Your Life” when a parent presents the grown child with his birth certificate, a final umbilical cord severed. It also traverses other stages of life, its physical and emotional frailties, as in “Fracture” about a broken shoulder or “Miasma” about the etymology of the word and its use for an unexplained illness, or “As A Bruise Changes Color,” which claims, “A woman can walk into doors / only so many times…”. The details within her poems arise from Makofske’s ability to “study it all / with a jeweler’s eye / for each wink of color” as the speaker does in “Lens to Magnify.”
Part III of the book begins with “This Country Could Break My Heart,” a poem with a country song rhythm full of heartache and masculine bravado: “Ain’t nobody can challenge me / without a fight, this country says.” The “jealous heart” and “sweet talk” are not merely stereotypical but lead into a threatening “smoke ring” of oxymorons that causes the speaker to “curse us both before I hear / the rap, unlatch the triple-bolted door again.” The tone is set for poems ranging from the political climate and angst of our nation (“Doldrums Near the End of Empire”) to the speaker’s own attempt to understand “Nightmares,” the “form[less]” thing that “wakes” the speaker “without malice” and “would say / nothing personal, if it could speak.”
Honesty pervades Makofske’s poems, whether she is being facetiously critical or solemnly grateful. She is aware that “we love not knowing / how we’ve been deceived” (“Out of the Box”) even as we engage in “willing / disbelief, cut off from our usual values, / ourselves from ourselves.” Our own willingness to deceive ourselves at the expense of our better selves, to perpetuate illusions about the lives we live, is what gives fullest value to the idea that each of us is “No Angel.” Her final poem, “This One Life,” fittingly asks us to consider the choices we have because this life “is the only one / you can be sure of.” This collection speaks to how troubling and amazing life can be and how our own choices and actions can impact not only ours but the lives of others in profound ways.
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Diane Bliss is a retired professor of English and philosophy, an avid birder and writer. Most recently, she has had poems appear in two anthologies: Seeing Things (2020) and Voices from Here 2 (2017), as well as in Blueline Literary Magazine. She resides in Middletown, NY.