Memento Mori: a book of sonnets

by M. Brooke Wiese

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Many years have transpired between the publication of M. Brooke Wiese’s first chapbook and this, her second, Memento Mori, published by FLP. Wiese’s first, titled At the Edge of the World and written in her “salad days,” was full of youthful wonder and romantic yearnings. In this book, Wiese considers with the practiced eye of a lifelong observer all the things that make up a life: the flush of youth in her teenaged sons, failed relationships, renewed love, the societal tragedies of our own creation, the death of parents “papery and brittle as a late-Autumn leaf riddled with pinholes,” and her aging self – “I am losing at least one word a day…” – a poet’s worst nightmare.

In one poem the poet holds her fingers to the night sky on either side of the bright, full moon as if she is cradling it between her spread fingers, or holding her whole world in her hand. From inside the shadows of mortality, Wiese looks forward and back and then forward again, meditating on the renewal of life in a spring leaf unfurling “in palest green,” the magnificence of a red-tailed hawk gallivanting around the city, delight in a pod of dolphins spotted on a beach walk, and the lights across the bay that “glitter along the mainland shore like far-away planets and stars.” There’s always something new to see.