Reviews
M. Brooke Wiese is an exquisite formal poet. Here, she breathes new life into the sonnet and rides at ease in patterns of her own invention. Many of her lines, and even some of her rhymes, are ruthlessly witty and almost successfully hide her heart, which beats within as faithfully as her rhythms.
In her smart, witty, lucid sonnets M. Brooke Wiese reinvigorates scenes and delivers up memories. Her piquant poems dive deep into love, family relationships, growing up, ageing and New York City. Whether her subject is an escaped owl, a boy’s first-growth beard, or a disappointed love, Wiese is piercingly observant, always offering an original point of view, bolstered by that most supple of poetic forms, the sonnet. Wiese has spent a lifetime with poetry, and the intensity of years lived reading and pondering shows in the intensely crafted poems of this splendid debut.
In her chapbook of sonnets Memento Mori, M. Brooke Wiese finds death everywhere: in a Cezanne still life, a schoolyard, lurking behind the scenes of childhood memories. Some poems convey pain, others great joy, as if the awareness of the space between the contradictory realities behind life and death compels us to understand the mysteries of all that we fear and love. Parents after death are “still stealing our love like a thief,” while “Age does not glide in like a swan,/ but like a flatbottomed scow,” and in early spring, before the abundance of blooming flowers, a dramatic couplet, “Demeter now keeps her daughter housebound,/ implores her to stay nine months above ground.” Traditional forms support the explorations, many of them set in the City of New York.
Your poetry is absolutely mesmerizing. While reading, I couldn’t stop thinking of the art song Die Mainacht by Brahms—the same sense of longing, beauty, and vivid atmosphere. The imagery was so exquisitely presented that I felt transported into each scene. The references, especially Demeter, were stunning, and it was nearly impossible to choose a favorite. I Need You Like a Hole in the Head stood out to me; I read it multiple times along with Sailing to Tokelau. Your work is breathtaking, evocative, and deeply moving. Bravissima!
M. Brooke Wiese’s poetry takes us not only to New York City – under the Verrazano Bridge, a tenement rooftop on a hot summer night, Central Park in Spring – but also deep into the poetic form itself. Using sonnets, villanelles, tercets, and rich words – laudanum, harrumphs, plundering and princeling – she carries the reader to explore such topics as love, despair, dolphins, and the dust of death. The journey leaves us full of awe and wonder.