A Review of the O in the Air by Maryann Corbett

By Christopher Honey

Maryann Corbett, The O in the Air. Colosseum/Franciscan University Press, 2023.

Review by Christopher Honey

I have been thinking about what makes a collection of poetry something more than just an assemblage of poems written since the author’s last published assemblage. There are thematic books, like anthologies, but also like Nick Maione’s Infinite Arrivals, which only contains poems about his experience of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. Anne Carson produces many project-based collections, like Men in the Off Hours, which portrays difficult men, like Antonin Artaud, through poems based on other media, like set directions for a television interview. Charles Wright put out a whole collection of sestets, entitled…Sestets: Poems. And, without naming names, there are poets past and present whose manuscripts are united by little else than having all been written by one person and being sufficient to fill a book.

Having gotten this far without having mentioned Maryann Corbett, I will now introduce her latest, The O in the Air, as being a book that hits the sweet spot between “a bunch of poems” and “this whole thing might just be one long poem, actually.” The collection progresses emotionally without railroading the reader and is united without being a unity through the repetition of certain ideas and a visible commitment to formalism (visual because many of the poems make use of both regular stanzas and indentations within stanzas that the casual peruser can make out without scanning for meter and rhyme). The emotional progress I experienced was from a kind of melancholy reflection on the past towards something more lighthearted, before settling on often somber introspection. Corbett is a well-known formalist, but she is deliberately playful in her use of it, with a variety that keeps the reader engaged and avoids ostentatiously showing off her fine mastery.

In my limited experience, formalist poets can be a prickly bunch when the topic is broached. I’ve seen a few veer off into a bloody-minded superiority born out of a sense of having, like very early gentrifiers, gotten here first, salted with a sense of persecution at the reckless hands of Johnny-come-lately free versifiers. This is why, despite being a frequent writer of semi-successful metrical poems, I enjoyed watching her poke fun at super serious formalism (and perhaps also at a holier-than-thou strain within our shared Catholic faith).

“Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers” is a perfectly traditional sonnet, arguably the “uber” form of English language formalism. The subject is about changes to prayers and creeds that the Catholic Church installed some years back. I understand and respect the desire to constantly work to provide more accurate translations, but am sympathetic to the speaker of “Prayer” and personally wonder if the use of “consubstantial” made things clearer for congregations.

Despite the careful regularity of its sonnet form, I cannot help but read these lines as saying as much about strict formalism as about theology:

          These prayers translated plumb—and—squarely
	  Pinch and constrict us (though we grant
	  They broaden our vocabulary).

As someone who would often prefer to drop an anapest or spondee into iambic pentameter rather than trawl my thesaurus and hammer its fruit into place, I see these lines and this poem as saying something about poetry, as well as liturgy. I said that Corbett is very regular and precise in her use of poetic forms, but within this otherwise perfectly formed sonnet, she commits what I was taught was either a sloppy or sneaky sin against formalism: she enjambs on a hyphen!

          Shunning (see Matthew 6) the poly—
          Syllables of the Pharisees.

This violation of the code, within the larger context of the poem, feels like a wink and nod to subtle resistance (which is not to say throwing out the baby with bathwater) to things that “Pinch and constrict us.”

A few years ago, I was sitting in a lecture by the poet Dana Gioia, and he was asked about how he decided which form to use, to which he responded that he started by writing the poem and only later, after the poem itself had informed him, did he decide on things like rhyme and meter. I won’t guess at Corbett’s process, but she always seems to let the poem determine itself, as in the one I spoke about above, where she uses the classic form of the sonnet to wink at a poem about feeling constricted by rules. In another poem, “The Hoarder,” she writes seven stanzas about, well, a hoarder; and each stanza is itself a sonnet! Seven sonnets, multiplying and tumbling over themselves into absurdity—order that turns into a kind of disorder through sheer volume. This form also suggests how a hoarder can see hidden patterns in their mania for keeping and collecting.

A poem that most parents (and plenty of aunts and uncles and family friends) can relate to, “Circardian Lament, Sung to a Wakeful Baby,” uses just two rhymes—A and B—over five tercets and a quatrain. In an ABA and an ABAB scheme, she ends every line with either an “ake” (the A rhyme) or an “ay” (the B rhyme). As a parent who remembers inventing songs and rhymes for his definitely not sleepy child, that consistent sing-song rhythm is very relatable.

One of my favorite bits of formal play is in “What They Told Me.” Each line is a complete sentence beginning with “It was,” and each of its four quatrains uses an ABAB scheme… but with slant rhymes on the A and true rhymes on the B. Perhaps this is some obscure form I don’t know about, but I know that it is a brilliant rhetorical progression and that I wouldn’t have thought of attempting something like this:

          It was brief, and a freak storm, though the sleet stung.
	  It was dripped on a silk drape with a soft sheen.
	  It was heels on a hard floor, and the sound rang.
	  It was tiny, a white grub, but it wormed in.

Obviously, there is a lot more to The O In the Air than its inventive use of rhyme and meter, and it’s a worthwhile read on a very basic level. As a Catholic, I loved her poetic struggles with approaching the Eucharist and what it means to forgo it. In “Monuments,” her exploration of a graveyard in Minneapolis and the speaker’s pause over the resting places of “Civil War / martyrs” struck me as a far more succinct rebuttal to efforts to preserve Confederate monuments than any counter-protest outside of a bronze rendering of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson (and yes, I did wonder if she was also referencing Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”). So, go ahead and read it. You won’t regret it. Even if you don’t care about the spiritual turmoil of Catholic parents or care to care if a line is pentameter or hexameter, you will appreciate that it is a collection (in the best sense) of good, usually serious, but sometimes fun, poetry.

Christopher Honey is completing his MFA thesis at the University of Saint Thomas. His poetry, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Rumpus, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, U.S. Catholic, and Poetry South. He lives and works in Washington, D.C. with his wife and daughter.