The House With Only an Attic and a Basement

"This is her third book, and it shows her coming into her own. Its humor is more dismaying than the others I’ve chosen, its control of language ever more precise. Her often dysfunctional speakers stumble into catastrophes with their eyes wide open. A fair number of reviewers, I’ve noticed, have taken these monologues as thinly veiled autobiography. Whether there’s any personal overlap or not, it seems to me that the poems clearly indicate a ventriloquist approach to their material. The book has three poems called ‘Catherine and Her Wheel’. It sounds like the author’s own name, but visually isn’t the same, which is a good example of the way in which the self is used in her poetry, but actually displaced. Not to perceive this would be to lose half of the enjoyment, as well as its disturbance. If you read them thinking this is autobiography, so much of the play of the poems is lost. It’s not an uncommon general assumption since the days of the Confessional poets (Sexton, Plath, Lowell and Berryman being the prime examples). Even that label is a misnomer and a mis-appreciation of what these poets were each of them doing very differently. Maris has this lovely play, in the third of those Catherine Wheel poems, on the Spanish expression “nada de nada”: that there was nothing , that there was ‘ nada de nada ’, the most perfect Spanish expression, the most beautiful and poetic circle, the nothing wheel, the wheel I have carried through all routes of my life, the wheel I was fundamentally wedded to, my true beloved, watch me touch it now look at it look at it: nothing. Like the Spanish expression with its emptying repetition, the repetition of the last line spins and accelerates, losing even the punctuation. What I like best is the way the vanity the collection addresses, among other things, is exposed, and edgy, and teetering on the abyss. I hadn’t really questioned myself about its relation to contemporary politics, but it feels current without explicitly addressing the subject. That may well be how, in many cases, poetry deals with the contemporary."