Ghost Heart by Mary Pinard
Ex Ophidia Press, 2022
Mary Pinard’s most recent book, Ghost Heart, winner of the 6th Ex Ophidia Prize, is a beautiful lament set against the backdrop of the American prairie and the brutal history of oppression of the Native Americans. It also contains the widow’s grief, the sister’s loss, and the naturalist’s keen eye for renewal and recognition. David Ferry, who we sadly lost in 2023, wrote in his endorsement that Pinard’s book is a “great elegiac poem.” In his exquisite award-winning book, Bewilderment, he laments the passing of his wife, Anne Ferry, within his gorgeous translations of Virgil and Catullus. He certainly would recognize the classical lyricism mixed with the experimental in the sense of plotting and spacing of words that mirror the landscape of the fields. Pinard’s references to Tennyson, Sappho, Virgil, and Rimbaud echo loss and the vanishing prairie. One poem that haunts my mind is “Hardly”:
- Untamed
Oh tousled hair
-RimbaudHardly
a night goesby
when Idon’t wake
from it, itscore
missingyou back
next to meyour untamed
black hair
The turn of the line, the keen eye for spatial correctness, and accurate wording all allow the reader to feel these poems. Echoing David Ferry’s translations of the classical underworld, Pinard takes us on the journey of disbelief and unknowing in her poem “Underworld,”
into the earth where everything
belongs, but that here, in the Flint Hills
could not be severed, its skull capof chert, which has for a millennia
made plowing, furrowing, building un-
wise, so I come here
The endless futility of words expressed in gerunds together with the line breaks, which turn on uncertainty, gather force in the aimlessness and loneliness of these poems, or as Ferry has indicated, one long poem mourning the past and those close to the author. I had to look up the definition of chert, which is a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of microcrystalline or cryptocrystalline quartz, the mineral form of silicon dioxide. The entire book is composed of layers of earth, rock formation, the history of the plains, and the loss that comes with life.
In addition to the geological nod to the ancient formation of the prairie is the underlying Native American narrative erased from history in “Version 1’ and “Version 2,” where Pinard creates an erasure poem from an excerpt of “Thomas Jefferson’s confidential letter to congress regarding Indian tribe, land and funding for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, from a letter dated 1803”:
what we want we
want.
Ghost Heart is a love letter to the prairie. In the poem “Dear Prairie, I’ve Been Meaning,” the voice of a child speaks through the poet: “Looking out the car window, I saw your…, vastness… I wanted / …you to know… even though I was /…small, voiceless, …less …I now carry / your… gold, …grasses” The ellipses provide a halting of human speech, inexactitude, and the uncertainty of a shy lover or a small child, a “small, voiceless” inability to measure the vast beauty of it all.
Perhaps this is the time to read a book lamenting the disappearance of land and loved ones yet reveling in the beauty of the land and love. Perhaps this is just what we need now.
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Gloria Monaghan is a professor at Wentworth University. Her poems have appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, NPR, Poem-a-Day, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Quartet, and River Heron, among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award and the Griffin Prize. Her sixth book, Cormorant on the Strand, has been published with Lily Poetry Review in 2023. She recently completed a film on painter Nancy Ellen Craig, which was accepted into the Provincetown Film Festival.