Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 23, 2007

"Glory be to God for dappled things," writes Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem "Pied Beauty," and "Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement," says William Butler Yeats's character in "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop." Cate Marvin begins her exhilarating, fierce new book with a poem in that tradition of embracing the foul with the fair. Like her predecessors, Marvin exults in a powerful music of tumbling consonants and linked sounds:

LOVE THE CONTAGION

Quest the contagion, funnel much muck

through your hands upraised and cupped,

pour river-brack down your throat, pick

your scabs with loving glee. Love your

master of pestilence, conqueror of white

clothes: mud prints, paw prints, germs

not even the physician knows. Eat through

a muskrat's lair, divine the grub's slumber

beneath rotting leaves, take the lot, crush

it in your bare hands. Look at the moon

for its holes, narrow your eye at its skin

until you find its pores, squint your eyes

at the filthy sun and run toward the flavor

factory where the cherry stench hangs

above the highway, the machines that cast

that bright net of scent into the polluted air:

its mix of chemical so thick your breath

trips as if you're inhaling jello. Lap at its

stickiness, run your rough hands through

your own gnarled hair. Repel the lover,

cast his grace at broken ground. Wear

your lover's indiscretions like stickpins

in your apple hat: rotting skin, dry as dust,

ample-sliced, a great old pie atop your head!

Be the world. Do not deny our fascination

lies in its filth, the maggot's sweet diet.

Marvel at the corrupt! Make disgust your

lust and cast your fresh pain to the trash!

The sounds of these lines, a buoyant, imperative music, have their counterpart in the similarly buoyant images: for example, the "apple hat" that is "a great old pie atop your head," adorned with hatpin-betrayals. Sharp yet attractive, old junk yet glamorous, the imaginary hat is characteristic. The repeated action of expelling or discarding and the final noun "trash" make a counter-energy to the directive to embrace or accept. As in the poems by Hopkins and Yeats, opposed or contradictory energies must be combined, when the goal is, as Marvin says in the last stanza, to "Be the world."

(Cate Marvin's poem "Love the Contagion" is from her new book, "Fragment of the Head of the Queen: Poems." Sarabande. Copyright 2007 by Cate Marvin.)