Mary Ann Samyn

On a first quick read I found the poems engaging but slight, an opinion confirmed on a second, more attentive reading. Samyn’s style for the most part is breezy and jokey. In the book cover blurbs, Donald Revell uses words such as “mischief” and “devotional.” Lynn Emanuel calls Samyn’s writing “hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new.” I wouldn’t go that far. I love wit in a poem, but here, I would have preferred a less glib approach. Many of Samyn's lines read like instructions, directives, suggestions or even epigrams, particularly in the poems “A Girl Can Imagine, Can’t She, a Girl Can Dream,” “An Ambiguity,” “Her Sun Was Blue, Her Tree Was Green, Her Line Was Very Straight,” and “It’s Been a Lovely October Thus Far.” Reading Samyn, I became aware of the potential weakness in such an approach (the quirky, witty, stand-alone sentence). Although I question whether or not Samyn is truly a devotional poet, she does mention God a lot, in fact too often and for no compelling reason as far as my no-God sensitivities are concerned. The two poems that I appreciated the most in the collection, “Having Come This Far” and “Introducing the Bird-Watcher to the Bird,” show off Samyn’s talent when she succeeds in keeping her breezier proclivities in check.

“Having Come This Far”:

The loneliness was so old!
I had celebrated all of its birthdays.

Some verbs need helpers, my mother used to say.
Like the strings of an apron at the small of her back.

Today, a bird lay down in the grass.
Just like that, I’m telling myself.

If you knew how I thought of you,
you would say: this is a poem of praise.


“Introducing the Bird-watcher to the Bird”

Note: we began in error: a tingling.
*
You queried.
*
But have you a library, a system, an instrument?
*
—I shot back.
*
Thus, what had been null and void:
*
Dear Amateur—
*
Now we flit into view:
*
one calling out, each nightfall, the other
*
(sorry—)
*
begging back.

… (altro)