Maryann Corbett, "Mid Evil"

Winner of the Richard Wilbur Award

from Mid Evil,

A Trenta-Sei of Mixed Feelings at the Early Onset of Winter

at Poetry Daily

Mid Evil at Amazon

• Hardcover, 86 pages
• University of Evansville Press; First edition (January 1, 2015)
• ISBN-10: 0930982746
• ISBN-13: 978-0930982744

Learn more about Maryann Corbett here

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Praise for Mid Evil

Reading Maryann Corbett’s wonderful new collection, Mid Evil, I was reminded of Keats’ equation of beauty with truth. Suffused and haunted by history, Corbett’s poems derive their beauty and power from their fidelity to what is true, in the poet’s life and in ours. Among the truths these impeccably crafted poems witness and affirm is the continuing presence of the past....The journey of Mid Evil—into midlife, mortality, motherhood and medieval history—is one I highly recommend.

—Catherine Tufariello

This new collection of poems by Maryann Corbett will confirm what her fortunate readers already know: that she is a poet and translator of remarkable accomplishment, whose poems are ‘worldly’ and ‘knowing’ in the best senses of those words. They offer us the delights of their wisdom with an openhandedness for which the only possible response is gratitude.

—Charles Martin 

There are poems about forces of nature, musings and cautions, aging and mortality, what it takes for us to have come this far, what it will take to go on. But many are about the mundane, the events of day to day. I think the use of meter and form makes us see things anew; they provide a structure that that confers significance on our daily preoccupations. (I'm hearing Blake: "Everything that lives is holy.") This poet sees life, in all its complexity and variety, as worthy of all the praise we can summon. 

—Toni Clark

Maryann Corbett is an extraordinary poet. From “Teacup”’s delicate tracing of an object’s origin (“crushed bones are its essence”) to meditations on pop culture’s appropriation of Tolkien (“the fabled rights//of bard and makar, geste and fabliau, give place to rendering and CGI”), Corbett’s poems are both historically attentive and absolutely up to date. Her unique perspective blends a feminist outlook with a scholar’s interests—Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, or the intersections of verbal and choral music—yet a deep compassion always animates her work....

            —Ned Balbo

Maryann Corbett is a medievalist and a singer of sacred music, but her poetry will not settle in the rare book room or the choir loft.  An imp of instability, a demon from a Germanic forest, is forever lurking at its edges.  She is like the monk who goes on transcribing while the door is being battered down by Vikings.  Can high culture survive in America? Corbett, in Mid Evil, confirms that it can. She confirms it not only with elegance and vivacity but with the Midwesterner’s natural aversion to affectation. Hers is a plain-speaking lyricism that, buttressed by formal dexterity, can “sing, against the winds of history,/ that even now our darkened hearts might burn.” 

—George Green

As soon as it arrived I read half of it, unable to stop myself, though I had other things I should have been doing.

—Susan McLean

Mid Evil starts with scholarly study and ends in a wish for religious exultation; it begins with writing and ends in song, becoming a prayer for inspiration, confidence, purpose, and grace. Whether that prayer can or will receive an answer remains, for Corbett, an open question, but she comes to a conclusion I gladly endorse....

—Jeff Sypeck

...really a cracking good read. To say I enjoyed it is an understatement. I've waited years to come across a fellow female poet this good, in fact any poet this good!

—Olivia Byard

Corbett, "Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter"

Maryann Corbett, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter

Able Muse Press, 102 pp.

Maryann Corbett’s second full-length collection, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, draws on profound experience of deep winter in the lived environment, while keeping alive faith that the thaw will come and bring with it the bloom of “uncountable rows of petals.” The themes of this finalist for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award range from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Corbett’s keen eye brings to focus uncommon detail. Her masterful technical repertoire spans received forms, metrical inventiveness, and free verse. This is poetry that amply rewards the reader with its boundless imagination, insight and visionary delight.

Poems from Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter have been featured on Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and at The Poetry Foundation website.

Praise for Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter:

“What makes Maryann Corbett such a rare, excellent writer must be her talent for weaving together various artistic impulses, so that her poems often sound both traditional and brand new, both humorous and serious, both worldly-wise and, as John Keats once put it, “capable of being in uncertainties.” [She] remains a poet of the first order, and her poems are cause for gratitude, and deep enjoyment.”
—Peter Campion (from the foreword)

“...full of real gems!”

—Gail White

“Corbett is as comfortable and affecting within the tight confines of the Old English alliterative meter (“Cold Case”) and the Sapphic stanza (“Paint Store”) as she is with her supple blank verse and terza rima. Yet never does her rigorous craft interfere with the thoughtful, insightful content of these poems. A stunning collection, from one of America’s most gifted contemporary poets.”
—Marilyn L. Taylor

“I am mightily impressed by the perfect imagery of the title poem, the just-right form of the moving “Ballade for the Last Move,” and much more.”
—Jean Kreiling

“Sharply visual, skillfully and cleverly crafted, her poems draw out essences, ‘concentrated’ and persisting. ‘Beauty changes us,/ calling up wonder from our deepest selves/ to its right place.’”
—Catharine Savage Brosman

“These masterful poems announce themselves as winter pieces, and indeed they are so full of sleet and snow that readers may wish to dress warmly. But Corbett’s winter, a season when “dull forms come in the mail” and we eat “tasteless, stone-hard, gassed tomatoes,” is always lushly haunted by the other seasons, the way a house in one of her poems is fronted by a “three-season porch.” Corbett is one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry, and this is one of the best new collections I’ve read in years.”
—Geoffrey Brock

“...a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Each poem surprises.”

—Willis Barnstone

Credo at Verse Daily: http://www.versedaily.org/2013/chiller.shtml

Credo at American Life in Poetry: http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/457.html

Credo at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/maryann-corbett

About the author:

Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia, and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and works for the Minnesota Legislature. Trained as a medievalist and linguist, she holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota.

Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, and many other venues in print and online, as well as the anthologies Hot Sonnets, The Able Muse Anthology, The Best of The Barefoot Muse, Forgetting Home: Poems About Alzheimer's, Ekphrastia Gone Wild, Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century.

Her books are Breath Control (David Robert Books), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, a finalist for the Able Muse Book Prize, and Mid Evil, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award for 2014, forthcoming from the Evansville Press.

Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter is available from the publisher or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Credo-Checkout-Line-Winter-Poems/dp/1927409144

Maryann Corbett, "Breath Control"

Maryann Corbett’s first collection is about control: both metrical control and measure and the near-silence of emotional control required of men and women at midlife, between the departures of children from home and of aging parents from the world. The poems in this book make use of craft and containment to tackle fears, confront memories, and celebrate beauty and affection.

“Although every section touches me and keeps calling me back, I think the last two in the book--where the tone darkens and the reach widens--contain the poems I already treasure as if I had known them for years.”--Rhina Espaillat

“Corbett is not just playing with words (not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld said) but thinking and asking questions about things like class, ethnicity (as the daughter of Italian immigrants), the expanding universe, terrorism, Christianity... and while she's a middle-class suburbanite (as am I), she always comes at things with a broad perspective, entirely free of that kind of breezy complacency you often see in middle-class poets who are always writing about their vacations in Venice and whatnot. So when she writes about paying for her daughter's college tuition, it's with gratitude and an acute awareness of her parents' and grandparents' struggle to break into the middle class so as to make this moment possible, and of others' continuing struggles. And when she writes about the bland garden statue of St. Francis it's with an awareness that the real saint was a subversive who ministered to outsiders. I could go on and on, and I haven't even talked about technique. She's formally dextrous and all that, but what I like most is her poetry's thoughtfulness and humanity.”--Rose Kelleher, 2008 winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.

“I've been following Maryann Corbett's writing for years now -- in numerous journals as well as in online poetry workshops—and I'm delighted to see this collection at last. Corbett is a master of form. And by that I mean not merely able to write a sonnet or a pantoum, not merely able to turn out sapphic stanzas or Anglo-Saxon verse forms — but to turn received forms to her own purposes, intelligently and artfully. She makes these forms her own and uses them to elevate, to lend dignity and grace to her subject matter...”--Antonia Clark

“Throughout, one feels in close proximity to both the narrator (who in turn, more often than not, seems close to being the poet herself) as well as the other characters who inhabit her poems; close enough, indeed, to hear them breathe. They are real people, often in quiet situations, engaged with the minutiæ of daily life which are elevated in significance by Corbett’s transparent narration. This is the poetry of life as lived and reflected upon, rather than as detachedly observed and mythologised, and the language is that of a poet who is apparently holding a greater force in check.”--Philip Quinlan

“It's said that the finest books of poetry should never be read in one sitting, but savored for weeks, a poem at a time--an idea that had always sounded sensible to me until the night I first opened Maryann Corbett's stunning new collection, Breath Control. The concluding lines of virtually every one of these poignant, perceptive, exquisitely formed poems catapulted me to the next, and I didn't quit reading until four in the morning.

Now that I've finished the book--still amazed at the poet's skill--I'll be starting over, in order to savor again, among others, the likes of 'Transaction' (never has a bill for college tuition reverberated like this), 'The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs', exquisitely rendered in Old English accentual meter, "Collision Course", a many-layered poem about a relationship, told so honestly and directly that it makes composing in strict sapphic stanzas look easy. Here, without question, is a book-- and a poet--to be genuinely grateful for.”-- Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, 2009-2010

“Many of the poems are autobiographical but never so much about the poet as about the lessons and fears which we all may encounter during our own lives. Her deceptively gentle voice leads the reader through complex terrors and anxieties. She frequently uses antique meters to emphasise or satirise the timelessness of human behaviour.”--Janet Kenny

"Breath Control has wit without meanness, warmth without sentimentality, and craft without pretension. Maryann Corbett's poems are subtle joys."--A. M. Juster

"...There is a centeredness and a serenity in her work that is unsurpassed by any living writer of my acquaintance."--Timothy Murphy

“This is a remarkable and beautiful collection, both these attributes rooted in its underlying honesty. A wry and generous vision informs the poems, which are rooted in the real world and soundly crafted out of real language, grammatical and accessible, with bright scholarship and unselfconscious skill....This book will prove a lasting gift to the world, though I feel obliged to ensure that it carries a clear warning. The contents may affect the heart in ways that could prove permanent."--Ann Drysdale

“Corbett shows her technical mastery again and again in this collection. She pulls off a ghazal, blank verse, a sonnet, accentual Anglo-Saxon meters, tricky ballads, and rhyme forms I do not know if she learned or created, including a double abcedarian. She is by turns lofty, goofy, sardonic, mild, idyllic, and keen.”--Judy Swann

“...a stunner. The range of subjects, styles, and forms is astonishing, including some classical and Anglo-Saxon forms one rarely encounters in contemporary poetry, but with no whiff of the antiquarian about them. Whatever one may think of the forms, which are expertly handled, the content is firmly anchored in daily experience, filtered through a mind that is both feeling the emotions of personal involvement and connecting them to art, literature, music, astronomy, history, and everything else.”

--Susan McLean, 2009 winner of the Richard Wilbur Award

Link to sample poems from Breath Control at David Robert Books

Link to Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter at Able Muse Press

Link to maryanncorbett.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maryann Corbett grew up in McLean, Virginia. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and is the author of Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter (Able Muse Press, just out) and the chapbooks Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House) and Dissonance (Scienter Press). Her writing has appeared in River Styx, Atlanta Review, Rattle e-issues, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, and many other journals in print and online. Her poems have have won the Lyric Memorial Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and works for the Minnesota Legislature. She is married to John Corbett, a teacher of statistics and mathematics, and they have two grown children.