{"id":904,"date":"2022-11-16T12:49:42","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T17:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/?p=904"},"modified":"2025-02-22T09:47:39","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T14:47:39","slug":"poetry-review-the-track-the-whales-make-by-marjorie-saiser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/poetry-review-the-track-the-whales-make-by-marjorie-saiser\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: On The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser No. 6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected <\/em>Poems<\/em> by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Track the Whales Make<\/em> begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser\u2019s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser\u2019s poems themselves, the book\u2019s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the reader steps back further into Saiser\u2019s work, the world and its ordinary things and relationships continues to transform in beautiful reverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new poem \u201cSometimes I Remember to Watch\u201d explores not the sunset, but the pink sky it creates opposite itself. Saiser captures the feeling of an ever-shifting world, which shifts whether or not we pay attention: \u201cIt\u2019s brief, no matter whether \/ I raise my glass or turn my back. \/ The glow is, and then is gone\u2026.\u201d Saiser draws the reader\u2019s attention to the pink sky, not to the \u201caudacious\u201d sunset or anything more obviously breathtaking, because there is something beautiful and unmatched in that fleeting quiet. Throughout her poems, Saiser takes the ordinary and the ignored and finds the innate beauty in them, found largely in the fact that they, too, are fleeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saiser\u2019s poems are ultimately about love. Whether that be love for nature, parents, children, or even love gone awry, the heart of Saiser\u2019s work is love, which courses through not only the depicted relationships but also the ordinary, fleeting things that she so deftly captures. In \u201cI Didn\u2019t Know I Loved,\u201d Saiser discovers love in unexpected, everyday things, such as the speaker\u2019s mother\u2019s \u201cbig hands \/ slicing iceberg lettuce \/ with a thick-bladed knife\u201d or \u201cthe head of the nail, \/ the blow of the hammer, \/ blueprints become the shell of the house.\u201d There is a sense of gentle and welcomed surprise at the realization of love for these small things. Again, Saiser creates a sense of something fleeting, as the love is only now realized and has gone unnoticed for so long. This poem blends the love of family and home with the love of nature, creating a patchwork of an everyday world with love woven into the little things, only to be noticed now, when the choice is made to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Mary Simmons, MAR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print. The Track the Whales Make begins with a section… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,15],"tags":[46,80,43,29,30,81],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetry","tag-book-review","tag-marjorie-saiser","tag-mid-american-review-2","tag-poetry","tag-review","tag-the-track-the-whales-make"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1663,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions\/1663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casit.bgsu.edu\/marblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}