Marjorie Maddox’s latest, exquisite poetry collection, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, filters the hope, heartbreak, joys, and frustrations of life through the lens of a shattering event in the poet’s life: Her father’s failed heart transplant. Maddox walks her readers through a litany of complex emotions where faith wrestles for reconciliation with circumstance. In these poems, the heart itself becomes cracked open for exploration into what it means to love and lose, to be an individual soul, and to be cared for.
Maddox marries imagery with narration that guides the reader through carefully crafted and nuanced emotion. In “Treacherous Driving,” which opens the book, the speaker tells us that her father’s heart, received from a donor, is
…buried
in my father,
who is buried.
The simplicity and directness of the lines strike at the central irony of the poem: The heart donated to her father to prolong his life has come, quite quickly, to a second end. Lest Maddox leave us with such a dirge-like sentiment, the poem gently closes with a sense of grim gratitude for the donor’s selflessness:
The man and his heart,
cold on an icy road,
warmed us for weeks…
The mortality of the heart transplant is only one event that Maddox presents to the readers for contemplation and reflection. The scope of subjects covered by the poems in the collection is broad, yet unified around images of the heart and the sacred, such as the Sacraments, running parallel to and intersecting with the ordinary world of love, loss, and beauty. In her poem “The Waiting Room,” the speaker observes the silent sentries of families waiting to hear news of loved ones:
Your husband wants a liver;
I want a heart that breathes an average rhythm
within my father’s ribs.
The gravitas of the waiting is beautifully conveyed as the speaker continues to reflect:
Behind our prayers:
the backdrop of another family winning
what they’ve lost, their stuttered cares,
the infection and rejection on our cross.
The crosses we bear are different but heavy nonetheless. Here, we see the intersection between the sacred and the ordinary, how humanity is shadowed with the presence of the holy, our pain interlaced with Christ’s.
Maddox’s lyricism is stunning throughout, and the closing poem “Tape of My Dead Father’s Voice from an Old Answering Machine” displays her remarkable ability to express the delicate nature of grief without being sentimental. In a matter-of-fact tone, she writes of hearing his answering-machine message, after he’s died:
He keeps telling me he’s not at home,
that he’ll reply soon. He doesn’t know
he’s lying…
The collection is about both absence (the father is gone, just as the machine says) and presence (yet there’s his voice, endlessly re-playable). Maddox’s new book is about this dichotomy, conveying life and death in equally beautiful measures.
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