Our Lady of the Ruins

Battlefields, childbeds, forests of wolves and hanged men, pious sailors, mysterious saints, “a warship, disarmed in the desert, waiting for the flood”: all these figures, characters and scenarios populate the busy, evocative, Barnard Prize–winning second outing from Brimhall (Rookery), whose brief, highly colored poems evoke a universe part Dylan Thomas, part saint’s legend and part Tolkien. Brimhall yearns to represent the greatest questions of ethics, politics, parenthood, sexuality, and religious life by means of invented history and syncretic myth. “On ruined carpets we wallow with pomegranates and sweet wine,” she writes in “Hysteria: A Requiem”; “We want to forget the wayfarer we hung/ when he asked for food.” That unfortunate traveler joins the sailors and pilgrims, warriors, mothers, “a priest who pulls a rope/ of thorns through his tongue” in a cast of characters who face their fates—stillbirths, lynchings, sea journeys, religious ecstasies—in consistent, relatively straightforward free verse. Even readers who find these poems too much alike, or overearnest, may come away struck by the power in such vignettes, dream-stories, and legends as “The Visitation,” in which “Our breath shows itself// to us and disappears. As we enter the woods,/ the astonished wolf lifts its mouth from the lamb.” (Apr.)