Saudade

January 1, 2018

In line with Brimhall's previous book, Our Lady of the Ruins, this latest collection is a generational fugue fixated on ecclesiastical imagery and the backward tracing of the folklore of a family that persisted through the historical shifts of a Brazilian plantation community. One is readily and repeatedly reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism in Love in the Time of Cholera. In this loose novel-in-verse, each section centers on an individual from the family and acts as a movement, symphonic in mode and scope, exploring loss and the eroticism of the sacred. Each example of loss entails feverish ecstasy, an expectation for and suspicion of miracles. The most successful poems are a chorus series featuring various Marias in which Brimhall's lyricism is honed to its sharpest point. The chorus poems act as a backbone woven through the individually centered sections when the thread between those sections gets, occasionally, lost to miasmic religious image. These poems are a mirage, magical, and never quite fully forming into the story of water. VERDICT Some may crave back matter for context, but Brimhall's work is an unexpected and refreshing, though not essential, addition to contemporary poetry collections.--Trevor Ketner, Junior Library Guild

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Starred review from October 16, 2017
Heartache begets mysticism and mythmaking in this spellbinding collection of narrative verse from Brimhall (Our Lady of the Ruins) about miracles, curses, and the stories people tell to come to terms with their experiences. Brimhall’s amalgamation of poetry and theater tells a family’s mysterious past through a motley and impassioned cast of narrators—including a chorus of wandering girls all named Maria—possessed of contradictory feelings and stories about God, each other, and the truth of their history. Amid the chorus, one Maria assures that “Miracles arrive/ whether they are welcome or not,” while another counters that they “stop or they never happened/ at all.” Inspired by pastoral and scriptural styles, Brimhall utilizes baroque metaphors to emphasize the primal hunger that drives desire and destruction: “I’ll pull stingers from your chest if you’ll clean the blood/ from under my nails. If romance is a ballad, we are its authors/ and its victims and finished in four minutes.” Brimhall’s Amazonian landscape teems with flora and fauna, yet feels forlorn; she graciously enlivens the heady atmosphere with her wit: “Jesus makes it to the stage but forgets his lines,” she writes. Brimhall sums up her work in the title poem: “If only the past would have me now that I have/ its answers—its griefs and inheritances.”