In A Secret Room in Fall, Maria Terrone cleverly wields the tools of her trade – words. But these are not showy poems that wallow in their cleverness. Terrone moves from formal, to narrative, to lyric verse and back throughout this collection but it never loses her distinct voice – the voice of a New Yorker who is not completely ensconced in her “big city” life. The title poem, for example, playfully woos the reader to retire from “the blankness of mind / you mistook for enlightenment” during the summer:
Cardinals and blue jays at your feet
are weaving a pattern fluid
as a Persian carpet that you must ride
deep into the maze named Fall.
But there is certainly no escaping the fact that Terrone lives in New York City and was witness to the events of September 11, 2001, reverberations of which are found in images and phrases in many of her poems. In The Mad Tea Party, a “blue September sky / cannot be ignored” and “Pulverized concrete furs / our coffee cups.” Terrone turns Wonderland on its head as she writes “Someone has murdered time. / Find him, find him! / Off with his head!”
When Terrone writes “in persona,” she gives us unique views of history from its legends, such as an Egyptian queen or Pilate’s wife. But more often, she simply writes as herself, from the observed life of one who knows the importance of looking inward for strength during difficult times. Terrone also hones her keen power of observation in poems that give insight into the lives of others, as in The Woman Ironing, where she looks back at childhood summers filled with promise and remembers:
…the woman we saw ironing all summer
at her apartment window who faced out
but never looked up, the weary
woman who stood, still ironing at dawn
when we glanced her way after a night spent
watching old movies and imagining
our future.
In A Secret Room in Fall, Maria Terrone utilizes the many ways poets have of communicating the deeper truths of life and human experience. Contained in these poems are exacting glimpses of ourselves, even among the imagined lives of anonymous others.
A Secret Room in Fall was a co-winner of the 2005 McGovern Prize by Ashland Poetry Press.
78 pp.
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