The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
BY Marie Howe
(W.W. Norton, 2009)

While reading the intelligent and provocative poems in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, it is easy to forget that this is only her third collection in more than twenty years. Her first book, The Good Thief (1988), chosen by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series, employed Biblical and mythical references that resulted in poems described by Stanley Kunitz as “in touch with the sacred.” Ten years later, Howe’s next collection, What the Living Do, was a moving elegy to her brother who had just died of an AIDS-related illness, and was filled with remembrances of shared childhood, their growing into adulthood, his illness, his death, and the flush of memories that followed. With her latest collection, the poet veers away from the ultra-personal narrative, and returns to broader metaphors that encompass issues of our day, giving us opportunities to examine our own lives in the context of her beautiful and moving language, as she does in “The Star Market.” Here a shopping excursion results in a spiritual reading of the homeless, while revealing also the inevitable irritation of an unavoidable aspect of urban life, her words illuminating the tug of empathy and repulsion many of us experience everyday:

Annoyance is conveyed here but tempered with a hint of shame and guilt confessed as well, and then more: think how trivial and shallow the poet’s shopping for “cereal and spring water” seems in the context of such poverty and sadness. Howe’s delicate choice of these two items initially elicits thoughts of sterile boxed cereal and expensive bottled water of the present day, but upon reconsideration we are reminded of the staff of life, the very basis of survival, both in the time of Jesus and today, for the poet and for her less fortunate fellow shoppers.

In this and many other poems here, Howe uses similar everyday experiences — shopping, running errands, arguing about a movie with a friend, the swatting of a fly — as a kind of ethical framework or lesson for living well, and often at her own expense, as she sees the contradictions of her actions versus her thoughts:

In this slender volume, Howe’s poems are as spare in their words as they are pointed and direct in their language; with conviction they face death and violence; they mark time; they conjure memories; they question high moral ground; they ponder motherhood; they contemplate our origins and our future.

In “Hurry,” Howe’s daughter is asked to speed up, a universal request from every parent to their young child; but in the lingering moment during which the poet takes the time to observe her daughter wearing the quintessential childhood costume of disheveled attire she realizes, at last, that hurrying is the opposite of what she truly wants or for what she knows to be important to her life. This dichotomy— and awareness of that dilemma — appears in other poems as well, such as in “Prayer” (p. 27), where the poet opens and closes with what should have happened, but has not yet done so because of the distractions of life that fill the space in between.

References to children abound in these poems, giving a powerful focus and structure for Howe’s moral concerns. Some poems begin innocently enough but quickly turn into terrifying scenarios, like the child’s questioning game of “Would you Rather” which begins:

And ends in a choice that no one can make:

In “The Tree Fort” (p. 26), the poet writes with memory of her own childhood, where a beloved structure on a neighbor’s land was torn down (“It stood beyond our boundaries / but we didn’t know that until the lot was sold”); here, child confronts child, with the implied threat of violence, but in the end it wasn’t the material that ultimately mattered but instead it was the emotional result: “And Gloria / became our neighbor, if not our friend.”

In this slender volume, Howe’s poems are as spare in their words as they are pointed and direct in their language; with conviction they face death and violence; they mark time; they conjure memories; they question high moral ground; they ponder motherhood; they contemplate our origins and our future. Marie Howe clearly wonders about her place on this earth, her relevance, her relationship with others she knows, and with those for whom she’ll never have contact. While she is neither prolific in her production nor loud in her presence, her poems are powerful reminders of what a poet, and ourselves, can offer to humanity, and why we should do it.