Nightfall Marginalia
A book of nocturnes and ekphrastics, the poem of the dream and the poem as dream, Nightfall Marginalia abandons diurnal constraint as it flickers through lyric and narrative, abecedarian, OuLiPo, prose poem, and parallax view. Twilit, autumnal, narrowly perched between elegy, eros, prayer and grimoire, here, the tangible-the sensate-becomes an entrance even to barely perceptible mystery, whether nearing the threshold of Hypnos or seeking the solace of a liminal dawn. Evocative, intricate, reverent and gorgeous and newly strange, these poems mark a new level of accomplishment for poet Sarah Maclay.
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Reading the lush, lyric poems of Sarah Maclay's stunning new collection, I dwelt for a time in the fair house of possibility. Nightfall Marginalia hovers between the desire for sanctuary, relation, and love-a longing for "the joined cathedral of our twinned hearts"-and something more aesthetically elusive, what one speaker has "come to recognize as prayer." Maclay's poetry brims with such an exquisite sense of beauty and truth that I hushed in the end with awe.-Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
Sarah Maclay's dream-voice hums with the energy of heart-body desire and cleanses with the fineness of an excellent mind. These new poems feel gathered from the margins of a night continuously falling, shaped by an intimate twilit voice, starred with mythic images, that speak-sings in many registers. A narrative emerges, centering in a feminine figure both unique and representative of a city and a time. Yet there is no self-mythologizing here. Rather, the poet's voice discovers itself already within a mythic role in the here and now-James Cushing, author of Tangled Hologram
Finding beauty at the frayed edges of a collapsing world, Maclay's Nightfall Marginalia is a voluptuous enactment of both a ruminative intuition and an exuberant intelligence. A place to revel, where the fruit is heavy on the vine, each line a velvet cloak to be pulled up-to reveal the mysteries of desire, mortality, the nature(s) of consciousness itself. Blissfully, there are no easy answers here, just a deepening of the questions. One of contemporary poetry's most compelling sensualists, this is Maclay at the height of her bewitching powers.-Louise Mathias, author of The Traps
Strange as it may seem, sensuality--genuine sensuality--is our one sure access to an honest humility. Color humbles us. Touch chastens us. With a fine artist's humility (I think of Pierre Bonnard continuing to touch up his paintings on the French museum walls), Sarah Maclay sustains a careful and even reverent contact with the objects and surfaces of our world. The results go far, far beyond mere description.-Donald Revell
