{"id":11106,"date":"2025-05-14T16:08:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T16:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11106"},"modified":"2025-05-14T23:21:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T23:21:32","slug":"seeing-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/14\/seeing-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Things"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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A Hidden Wholeness Revealed <\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Maddox\u2019s latest poetry collection tackles suffering straight on\u2014which means mingling the real darkness with real light.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Gloria Heffernan<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Seeing Things, <\/em>the new collection by award-winning poet Marjorie Maddox, is both a searing look at the traumas endured by three generations of women in one family, and a profoundly moving testament to resilience, faith, and love. The title can be read in two ways. It can mean seeing things that aren\u2019t there, as in the hallucinations suffered by the narrator\u2019s daughter. But it also refers to seeing things as they really are and doing what needs to be done in the face of those realities. In the title poem, Maddox observes:<\/p>

Angels and saints somehow still name
the invisible within the visible,
Still break the shadows with light.
And can this make us whole?<\/p>

The sixty poems in this collection continually break the shadows with light. The quest for wholeness and the tension between the visible and the invisible resonates throughout the collection, which finds the narrator coping with her daughter\u2019s struggles with depression, her mother\u2019s advancing dementia, and her own memories of abuse. But while there are excruciating accounts of pain and struggle, there is also an abundance of healing, consolation, and dare I say it, joy. In the final analysis, the collection is a treatise on caregiving: for the daughter, the mother, the world in its suffering, and ultimately, the wounded self. The poem \u201cIn the Company of Women\u201d reminds us that suffering is a communal experience. When shared, others see that \u201cthey, too, will survive\u201d and the massive load \u201cweight-lifted together, \/ becomes stone bridge, becomes \/ path home.\u201d Indeed, Maddox becomes that bridge. The care revealed throughout this collection extends to not only her own mother and daughter; it offers a path home for everyone who has served as caregiver to a beloved one who is suffering.<\/p>

Maddox takes no shortcuts on that path. She never shies away from the things she is seeing. \u201cRecoil and run \/ is the way to go when fear\u2019s tattooed \/ the inside of the brain,\u201d she says in \u201cTrust.\u201d But Maddox does not run. She faces the suffering of her mother and daughter while also confronting the terror of her own memories. In \u201cDetails,\u201d a poem written in the third person, she renders painful facts as if filing an imaginary police report:<\/p>

It was dark and it hurt. This is
how your parents make babies. This is
how the nightlight left on when everyone else
is gone reminds her to spot-clean the sheet,
tuck the moist fabric around her innocence.<\/p>

The agony of the child is rendered in succinct clinical language which makes the reality of what she later refers to as \u201cthe incident\u201d that much more horrifying. And the horror comes full circle in a later poem, \u201c#MeToo\u201d in which she says:<\/p>

It\u2019s hard to mourn a past
you\u2019ve thrown away without an elegy
to mark its pain. And yet all grief outlasts

the syllables we grab to make a poem
that looks like us.<\/p>

In these poems, Maddox finally allows herself to mourn and retrieve what had been thrown away. She universalizes her experience with the use of the word \u201cus.\u201d She is not only mourning for herself; she is mourning for every woman who has experienced that violation.<\/p>

Whether describing her daughter, her mother, or herself, Maddox faces the fears over and over again, perhaps nowhere more urgently than in the poem \u201cFound and Not Found,\u201d in which she briefly loses sight of her daughter, a young child, at the beach. \u201cYou raised your small hand and waved, \/ unaware of the terror in a parent\u2019s empty arms.\u201d The narrator does not yet know that she will reexperience that terror again and again in years to come as she reaches for the daughter who will cross other thresholds where she cannot be reached. She also doesn\u2019t yet know that this daughter will triumph as she discovers a path to healing described in \u201cOde to Daughter as Artist\u201d which celebrates \u201cthe unannounced swirl and burst of emergence\u201d and \u201ccreativity tottering on eternity.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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This is not a simplistic happily-ever-after kind of celebration.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Among the most extraordinary poems in this collection are the fearlessly tender narratives surrounding her mother\u2019s dementia. These poems bear witness to both the clinical decline of the patient, and more importantly, to the tender care of the beloved. We see the mother remembering to send cards for special occasions but not recognizing her son and daughters. In \u201cManners,\u201d she moves from confusion to rage to \u201cpolite small talk\u201d in a matter of minutes:<\/p>

When her mind and body
again thrash violently
and \u201cfor her own protection\u201d (the aides explain)
they strap her into a straitjacket,
my mother pleads with us to find
her daughters, who \u201care always happy to help.\u201d
\u201cThank you so much,\u201d she smiles,
before glaring at us suddenly
with someone else\u2019s impolite eyes.<\/p>

Maddox is unsparing in the details of her mother\u2019s illness as she describes moments of intense suffering, but she is also generous in recounting the tender joys that might be overlooked if one were to become hardened by despair. In \u201cStill Life with Rabbits and Phone,\u201d she captures such a moment during a long-distance call describing the daily antics of a rabbit that visits her backyard:<\/p>

\u2026I have fallen in love with the rabbit
who returns each evening to a small patch
of dying grass in the middle of Central Pennsylvania
while my ailing mother in Arizona
suggests as names \u201cPeter\u201d or \u201cHoppy\u201d or \u201cHope.\u201d<\/p>

The simple and mundane delight of the rabbit\u2019s presence provides a respite for the poet\u2014and the reader as well\u2014who is reminded in these exchanges that the mother is more than a patient; she is a source of joy to the daughter who treasures these quiet moments beyond the illness.<\/p>

While each poem in this collection offers brilliant insights and images, the collection as a whole offers a master class in structure. Maddox gracefully weaves the stories of the three main characters into a complex braid that exemplifies the wholeness that she refers to in the title poem. There is no separation between the three through-lines. The poems are in conversation with each other throughout. Structurally, Maddox chooses to seamlessly interpose the more difficult pieces with a series of odes that remind us to notice the goodness around us even in the dire circumstances in which we may find ourselves. The odes act as punctuation, like a comma that invites the reader to pause and take a breath. \u201cOde to Everything,\u201d the final poem in the collection, serves as a kind of hallelujah chorus, declaring, \u201cEnough with lamentations. \/ Open the window and sing.\u201d This is Maddox triumphant. The Maddox who faces the turmoil and pain but never loses faith in the possibility of beauty and healing. This is not a simplistic happily-ever-after kind of celebration. This is the hard-won peace that is fueled by an unshakable faith which is best summed up in the final lines:<\/p>

Celebrate! such green giving
of thanks, such miraculous mercy of earth:
calm valley and even this rugged, rocky chain
we climb now as family, claiming praise as respite,
holding close each breaking day, dangerous
yet divine in all
its gorgeous glory.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Gloria Heffernan<\/strong>\u2019s fourth book is Fused<\/em>, from Shanti Arts Publishing. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence<\/em>\u00a0(Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review<\/em>\u00a0Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica<\/em>\u00a0(Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List<\/em>\u00a0(New York Quarterly Books).\u00a0 Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence<\/em>\u00a0(vol. 2).<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Seeing Things: Poems<\/strong> was published by Wildhouse Publishing on February 28, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maddox\u2019s latest poetry collection tackles suffering straight on\u2014which means mingling the real darkness with real light. Review by Gloria 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