Reviewed by Anne Graue

In Mary Meriam's collection, Pools of June, we enter a different world, a place where "cicadas buzz and hum in forest trees," where iambic pentameter sounds as natural as a summer garden or a trip to a farmer's market. The opening poem, "Carrie's House" is filled with questions, birds, rhyme in two quatrains and a couplet that invites us into the speaker's story of a complicated love. Meriam's poems transport and transfix, hum and trill in lilting lines with a variety of poetic forms that feel perfectly suited for this poet and each poem.

In A Little Book on Form, Robert Hass paraphrases Peter Sacks stating that ". . . Sacks has remarked that some of the appeal of the sonnet may have to be because it has the same proportions as the human face," and that ". . . the sonnet originates as a kind of staring into the eyes of the beloved." Meriam's sonnets in this ambitious collection fit this definition.  In "The Lost Crown," we find ourselves gazing into a face that itself gazes at the moon, ponders life and love, and ". . . creates its own / body of flash, lies, death, a mallard duck / of love who hasn't found a lake of luck." This 15-sonnet sequence culminates in a pristine final sonnet of first lines that feels as if it wipes out all that came before, basking in its own existence. The sequence, which appears about midway through the collection, asks questions, ponders desire, and travels through time as it is urgent in its lament: "Why does Time keep tearing us apart?" We are presented with the acceptance of an anguished lover in these lines:

The rain resolves to fall
again, on nights that knock against your wall
like ghosts without a home, without a boo.

At the end of the sequence, the speaker returns to the opening line, "I stop to gaze for minutes at the moon," uncovers a labyrinth of possibilities at the beginning, and feels like comfort when it returns. Other sonnets throughout the collection are similarly adept in sound and sense, following schemes of rhyme and meter that suit their purposes.

In the mournful "Where I Wait," lines vacillate in syllable counts to transport readers to "a forest-full of greeny gifts" where Love addresses the speaker in a perfectly executed volta saying, "'Hey, lost one, / stuck-in-the-woods, you bird-girl-leaf / who sings in springs without belief, / don't trash your dope. I am not done.'" the rhythm and the content mesh into a message of patience culminating in a breezy couplet.

The sonnets in this collection by themselves are satisfying enough, so finding other formal gems in its pages brings added joy. Each presents itself without a thought to which might be the better or more pleasing, but rather which form makes the most sense in its place. Coming upon each form feels like a revelation, be it villanelle, ghazal, sonnet, or a handful of rhyming couplets. Each poem is a small gift handed to us from the poet, and Meriam's work offers the illusion of ease when we know that finely crafted lines have been sculpted out of raw stone. The gorgeous villanelle, "Trees," is filled with nature imagery that neatly fits the rhyme scheme of this age-old form. To have it focus on trees, also known for their longevity, is a stroke of poetic genius, and the slight changes in the repeated lines are seamless yet echo in the best way, the voice who claims,

I love this screen of oak and maple trees
hiding me from the boaters on the lake.
I love the fattened leaves in summer's breeze

singing the forest full of symphonies.

Meriam's skillful handling of language in every piece brings the complicated love stories to the reader in such a way that understanding feels effortless and lines remain in the memory. This is also true in "Ghazal of Going," in which Meriam has crafted couplets of longing ending with the repeated word "alone," creating a mournful sound throughout the poem as the assonance emphasizes the tone of loneliness in lines such as these:

The lifelong lonely ones still listening for the phone
will live alone on mountains silently alone.

With this and other poems, Meriam hammers home with careful language the emotional toll love can take.

Poems in free verse are also finely tuned with effective line breaks, caesura, and enjambment, devices that add to the illusive quality that these poems are simply thoughts on paper written by someone deeply affected by love. The subtle rhyming in "Beads," for instance, might go unnoticed in the tercets in which we find it. Meriam calls on readers to pay attention to language in such a way that meaning becomes enhanced and the experience fulfilling. Consider this final sentence of the poem broken into graceful lines attentive to sound:

If she
hadn't stung
my face,

if rain
would
soak

the
terrible
ground,

if a
single
bee

made the
loudest
sound,

perhaps I'd
keep
my necklace

in a case,
hidden
from every

view
except
your eyes

that see
me thru
my cries.

The lines are finely hewn to cradle the sounds that are so necessary for the reader to grasp their significance.

Craft, imagery, and metaphor have merged to form a coalition of meaning that arises from the pages of Mary Meriam's Pools of June, and the results of the fusion of language, meter, and rhyme produce poems that are deeply gratifying and that linger long after they've been read.