Mary-Marcia Casoly, Run to Tenderness
(Pantograph Press/Goldfish Press)

Jack Foley

     I came across Mary-Marcia Casoly’s poetry at the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival about a couple of years ago. She read her poem, “Australia Dreaming” in the open reading: I can’t remember a single other poem that was read that day; I remember hers vividly. I loved the sound of the poem:

               The laughing kookaburra blinks his dark

eyelashes three times slowly, before gulping down dark
ochre streaks of barramundi bones....

     A poem she showed me later has an even more impressive collection of vowels and consonants: “your strange coco-pop bark; / your rich shade of fern green, shocks.” There is also

The air’s florid with kweets,          tinkling tswitt-witt-witt
            chick-oo-wee              quoy?   quoy?

from this volume.

     All the poems Mary-Marcia Casoly eventually let me see seemed to be--in her own phrase--“songs of the great unconformity.” How many poets would be likely to use words like “monotreme,” “goanna,” and “kookaburra”? How many poets would even know such words? Odd animals often appear in her work. I can’t imagine a more peculiar poem than “Of Monkeys and Old Clothes,” but I think it is also quite wonderful. Casoly’s considerable humor often issues forth out of some immensely strange place (“those Patas monkeys were spotted / out on a ledge, trying on camisoles together”) and becomes, in its strangeness, as touching as it is comic: “you’ve found them a job / in some little coffee house bakery in Massachusetts.”

     One of the unfortunate effects of the immensely active creative writing programs found across the country is the creation of a kind of “common poem” which the “common man” (or “woman”) can learn to produce. There is nothing very wrong with such poems--they are often fairly skillful creations--but there is nothing very right with them, either. Casoly’s poems are rooted in a sensibility which can perhaps be imitated but which can hardly be “taught.” Her imagination seems to be stimulated by individual words--words which appear as nonesuches, monads--and the poem finds its shape by discovering ways in which these nonesuches can connect with one another. I hadn’t realized until I read “Australia Dreaming” that it was a sestina--a form in which six individual, more-or-less unrelated words give rise to everything.

     Yet to make this point about language is to ignore those poems which seem to arise full-blown out of the details of the poet’s life. “Blind Sided” has a direct connection to the fact that Casoly is blind in one eye, and “Mothers by Adoption” and “Undertow,” among others, refer to the fact that her birth mother gave her up for adoption. Casoly can be extraordinarily tender:

Hazel widens the heart
Not like a river, not like a house,
                                 but is half river, is half house

                                                   I don’t really know you
                                                                             but love

 and she can be “experimental” as well: witness “Aspects of Clairvoyance: / Jackfruit” or the brilliant “In the Dry Season.” (The line, “Silence is appropriate with feathers” from “A Black Field of White Crows” sounds like something out of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.) Often the poems veer between language which is fairly straightforward and narrative (“you jumped from a second story / window”) and language which is anything but that, so that we’re constantly kept in a state of alertness, never quite knowing what will show up next. Some of the most extraordinary poems in the book arose out of trips Casoly happened to take to Australia and Thailand.

The final “effect” of this complex, often stunning poetry is of language attempting to understand a mystery which is made more mysterious by the attempt to understand it. “Knowing” is an issue of Run to Tenderness--“What Lemons Know,” for example--but the work here is best described by a passage about the poet’s father in “Quixote and Sancho Take On the Bay Bridge, 1935.” Why should an artist bother, why take the risk? “Deep water calls to my father,” Casoly writes,

evokes invisible currents,
tankers and tugboats, the pencil-line gulls
he sketched in his margins.

Nobody knows why....

      One final thing: The cover of Run to Tenderness and some illustrations inside were done by Joe Petolino--a newcomer to this kind of work. The illustrations are as exquisite as the poems. The cover--which, like the poetry, shows Casoly at various stages of her life--is particularly haunting.

     Run to Tenderness is in every respect magical, beautiful, mysterious--all those things one would hope to have in a first book, or any book.

     Run to Tenderness is not yet widely available. It can be ordered by writing to

or by contacting me by e-mail.

Jack Foley