Benjamin Landry on Marianne Boruch’s The Book of Hours

The Book of Hours, Marianne Boruch. Copper Canyon, 2011
by Benjamin Landry

The Book of Hours is a deeply metaphysical arrangement, the primary concern of which is the interrogation of the act of creation. In it, Boruch is god-stung and bitter, in the most productive ways, with alternating lyrical control and wildness, a lineage that can be traced clearly back to Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Boruch is fixated on boundaries, best exemplified by the corporeal limits of the flesh imbued with extraordinary feeling that resists containment. Also like Dickinson, the typical Boruch poem proceeds by existential questioning. While Dickinson’s speaker conjures a God who is unable to provide adequate explanations, Boruch’s speaker conjures her own conscience, with the dramatic dialogue centered on the uses and ethics of creation.

While essentially free verse, the poems in this book—it would be wrong to use the haphazard ‘collection’—conform to a strict four quatrain stanza structure, for a total of sixteen lines apiece. Eight of these poems comprise each of the eight sections, for a total of sixty-four poems. The organizing conceit invites interpretations: since the number four governs the plan, seasons and seasonal change seem the most viable reading.  In terms of content, the instigating event that surfaces throughout is the hospitalization and death of the speaker’s mother. Ruminations on mortality are underscored by visitors from the natural world—wolves, grapes, ravens, trout, owls and wild geranium—whose lives are necessarily governed by the passage of seasonal time. The seasonal reading, though, is incidental. Keeping in mind the devotional archetype of a book of hours, I prefer to think of the structure as somehow interrogating the act of generation. If a Judeo-Christian god rested from his creation on the seventh day, then the eighth day is reserved for the creations to take stock of what has just happened, and ultimately, to make a determination on the creator. This is the moment when “god’s nothing to say” (40) registers most resoundingly.

Boruch deftly draws the parallels between creation—with a capital ‘C’—and other iterations of bringing order to nothingness and chaos, namely housekeeping and writing. In “To make a life inside, you,” the speaker’s grandmother “willed / her chair into a city-state, the porch / a fiefdom” (22). This imposition of order starts with literal furniture and moves “[…] relentlessly inward.  Water meets water / and divides and grows dark […],” (22) until we are now dealing with order imposed by force of will on an intellectual life. Part of the order necessarily involves obfuscation and repression, as the matriarch disposes of keepsakes and love letters belonging to her younger self in the homestead’s pond. As the title of the poem suggests, maintaining order is synonymous with the act of creation, giving birth, and the question becomes how the speaker is to maintain a similar sense of control in her own pursuit, writing. Most troubling for the speaker is the question of the origin of that power, whether it be from within (self) or without (god):

[…] That life
you wanted secret.  Do you
make that?  Or does it come and you
remember, it was here once. (22)

The writerly act of creation similarly exemplifies the tension between control and bewilderment. In “I thought the tree,” the creative act described in the title gives way to a narrative of quiet existence, with a human consciousness projected on a tree that harbors other life, “[…h]er heat / dark to that dark flash of feathers”(7).  But in “Let’s review the fog suit,” the things of this world fit uneasily into the metaphorical plan of poetry and “guys // who thought they were fishing” (51) find themselves in “that nothing” of the speaker’s wryly sadistic making.

In attempting to locate meaning, writing, Boruch knows, raises more questions than it answers, and she acknowledges the inherent frustration. In “I’ve had it with poems, he said,” a child’s drawing of a house becomes an occasion for the speaker and the conjured interlocutor to hash out an underlying paradox:

[…] Note
the brickwork.  The standard red
but crooked enough to charm.
That’s just it, he said.  I don’t
want charm.  I want incisors,
molars with hard silver in place of
such rot.  Why not gold? the voice,
shiny from that rooftop.  (53)

Here, “charm” is a story, a romantic notion attached to the lowliest materials of the physical world – so too “gold” with its long history of commodification. In fact, all of the materials imply other stories, and poetry is complicit in the sort of myth-making that ultimately feels like a ruse in spiritual applications. We see this clearly in the “Christ with a crook” in the supposedly transcendent mosaics that haunt the speaker’s deathbed vigil of her mother and are ultimately upstaged by the indifferent window washers descending and rising past the hospital room as the narrator “spoon[s] in the beef puree, the applesauce” (19) in the poem “The usual tacky mosaics one finds.”

In the end, Boruch seems to affirm that the stories we tell—whether in poems or in religious parables—are meaningless as spiritual truth.  But living in the physical world is no option either for the poet, in whose hands every object accrues metaphorical power.  To condemn a creator—with a capital ‘C’—is to condemn the poet, and Boruch does both. Still, the beauty and the terseness of the language with which she does so posits redemption. In “Not gracious but hair the wren,” she notes the hair of the departed the bird incorporates into its nests is “an offering, / the human head a curious instrument / of giving and use up and get back” (32).  Later, Boruch makes the poem hinge on a single unuttered word (‘felt,’ which if used would sink the poem and its subject with grief): “Delicate / and hopeless it must have, must have / as she knotted and wove.”  These touches indicate the hand of a craftsperson, just as the rigorous format of The Book of Hours is made to dissolve in light of language that is understated and convincing.

Benjamin Landry is a Meijer Post-MFA Fellow at the University of Michigan.  His collection Particle and Wave is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.  He blogs about poetry at http://benjaminlandry.wordpress.com/.