Review by Cammy Thomas in Mom Egg Review
http://momeggreview.com/2020/10/13/the-machinery-of-grace-cento-poems-by-patrice-boyer-claeys/
Patrice Boyer Claeys grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Manchester, U.K. Her first book of poems, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering was followed a year later by The Machinery of Grace in 2020, both from Kelsay Books. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.
This is a gorgeous book, made entirely of lines taken from other poems, but absolutely clear in its unified voice. I can’t see how she did it!
The book is in three sections, the first about the death of the speaker’s mother, the second a return to the past and movement forward again into grief, and the third a rebirth of joy. The opening and closing stanzas of the first poem will give a feel for the success of her technique:
Longing consumes us
from skull to tailbone.
And the sound of our deepest voice
rattles the long throat of the horizon.
[…]
Between us and the sun
is the wheel that brings it round,
and what I hear is my whole self
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea:
this life, this life, this life. (13)
Though this poem is a mix of words from eighteen poets listed at the back of the book, it reads as confident and coherent. The poem begins and ends in longing, in an acknowledgement of the certainty of death, and of our desire to stop things from “always falling.” The most striking aspect of the poem is its voice, beginning in first person plural, and switching seamlessly to “I.” The voice has a powerful, declarative stance: “what I hear is my whole self/ hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea.”
In “Bedside Vigil,” the first poem’s longing is echoed as the speaker watches her mother fade away:
What I can tell you is
death also stopped,
fanned out like wings under her arms
moving between the first world and the second
into time, flame. (18)
Oncoming death pauses, and her mother is suspended between living and dying, winged between those worlds. The word “flame” picks up the previous word “fanned,” just as “time” reflects the earlier “stopped.” Claeys has assembled lines that speak easily to each other. But she’s also arranged the kinds of discontinuities that make poetry live. Death fans out like wings, and moves into flame.
The second section of the book moves back in time to her mother as a young woman. In “My Infant Self Gives My Mother a Gift,” the speaker describes her own birth:
As she shrugged childhood,
broke from the shadows,
a dull pearl--
my face--
became a living touch,
and they laid me on her, breathing. (26)
In a mix of the metaphoric and the literal, childhood is shrugged, and breaks from the shadows, not just coming into light, but becoming corporeal. The image of the pearl precedes the image of the face, metaphor leading the way into the real. The face becomes a touch—a curious phrasing that emphasizes the way children’s bodies become intimately connected to their mothers’ hands. And then the last line finally clarifies that we’re talking about birth. Writing one long sentence, and withholding the key information until the end, Claeys forces us to suspend understanding and see the childhood, the shadow, the pearl, the face, the baby—the difficult and subtle progress from child to adult to mother.
In the final section of the book, the grief that has absorbed the speaker begins to lift, and other family members and romantic partners appear, in a happier world. “Plenty” describes sexual pleasure with a gentle partner. It begins,
Ruched in your arms
with the heat of your body
softening further those parts where flesh
holds the wonders of the universe inside its mazy folds,
I thought my body would catch fire.
The heat and pleasure of the sentence change the tone of the book, make it move into a more blissful space, which it holds to the end. And astonishingly, the twenty-one happy lines of this poem are made of the words of twenty-one poets as diverse as Carl Phillips, Chase Twichell, and Natalie Diaz.
In the pandemic, it’s hard to stay close to others. Claeys has summoned a community of poets whose lines she has knitted together to form these poems of lasting grace.
The Machinery of Grace: Cento Poems by Patrice Boyer Claeys
Kelsay Books, 2020, $16.00 [paper] ISBN 9781950462735
Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. It was followed by Inscriptions, and Tremors is forthcoming in 2021, all published by Four Way Books. She lives in Lexington, MA.
Review by Gail Goepfert in The Bind
An Intimacy with Loss in Patrice Boyer Claeys’s The Machinery of Grace
www.thebind.net/blog/claeys-machinery-of-grace
On the surface, Patrice Boyer Claeys’s book, The Machinery of Grace, is a narrative of losing a mother, first to mental decline, and then to death. We may think that it’s a common story—the loss of a parent, but it is also more. What accompanies that loss is a predictable measure of buoyancy in the present, evocations of the past, and the necessary movement into a faceless future.
Claeys’s early poems acknowledge the hold of one’s roots as a part of “this life, this life, this life.” Yes, “We have risen / from roots / born to age and die,” as the narrator asserts in the opening poem, “This Life,” yet she, and maybe we, cannot escape the “sashes of grief whipping [our] back” in her poem “Like someone lost in a forest.” We follow the memories of her mother’s saved recipes and childhood streets, the speaker’s bedside vigil, and the placing of the mother’s ashes in Lake Winnipesaukee. Each part of the journey feels simultaneously familiar and singularly intimate.
We shift time with the narrator through the poems in the book’s middle section—imagining her mother as bride and recalling a scene at the family table. We see the mother “lifting a pot / with a warm brick of chocolate surrendering to simmered milk,” hear the echo of “wake up wake up,” and witness the “ironing [that] hangs dejectedly over the chair / and the radio station of choice [that] adores Perry Como’s croon.” The movement in this book is flawless. We are steeped in details of the past that unleash pain, impart comfort, and prompt insight.
Two of the strongest poems of the book face each other in the center—one in the voice of an infant child and one that gives the mother a say. The first “My Infant Self Gives My Mother a Gift,” envisions the act of the daughter’s birth, in this case, the narrator, and suggests the child herself is the antidote for the mother’s loneliness. The speaker’s birth is a remarkable gift that she suggests doubles the mother’s “being”:
My own skin
talked to her, that song
of a newborn.
Mother,
proceed boldly
You are the center.
Now there are two of you.
In the persona poem on the facing page, “If My Mother Had Spoken of Her Childhood,” Claeys allows her mother to speak of “her sorrow and pleasure equally manifest”—from her only-childness and the loss of her own mother to the surprise of new life through her children, “sneakers and T-shirts playing / Find me! /in a field that always fills with fireflies.” Finally, the mother’s affirmation: “In my life I have done one good thing. / Given life.” The intensity in these two poems derives from the way voice is allowed to burble up—revealing a profound empathy for the mother’s needs and failings.
Poems that follow wrestle with the narrator’s own moments of wishing-her-childhood-had-been-otherwise: “Mother / I hope in the next life there’s none of this stuff,” words prompted by the constancy of a child’s morning chores because, “There are so many things to miss / while doing dishes.” She allows that her mother must have been “wanting to be sure / she would teach us to be the mother” in “Of the Hand that Made Me.” Claeys’s layers of truth expose the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, and, as we all must, the speaker sorts through both her grief and melancholy—fearing that “It is my own song that has flown,” and chiding herself, “If I’m not happy, it must be my own fault.” These poems assure us that there are no emotional boundaries in our responses to grief and loss, and there’s no time limit on their sway.
For the narrator, the last chapter, the final poem, is unwritten, but in the final section of The Machinery of Grace, she grapples with finding that place of acceptance. Or simply with settling into a life revised after significant loss; she grants entrance even to joy. There’s a reawakening of “desire, desire, desire” in “Jazzed,” a welcoming of being “ruched in [his] arms / with the heat of [his] body” in “Plenty,” and gratitude for her sister in “To My Sister, One Year After Placing My Mother’s Ashes in the Lake”: “I lie awake and weigh the heft of grace.” Eventually, in “Renewal,” there is new breathing space— “It is spring and I am capable of anything.”
The marvel of Claeys’s narrative is two-fold. First, it replicates the multitude of emotions that accompany losing. In the time of Covid and of the unrest with long-standing racism that leads to so many senseless deaths, the book’s story parallels her personal but conceivable experience of death and loss with the piling on of our current sense of collective loss. Even more remarkably, Claeys uses only the cento form in the unspooling of this narrative, a process that requires the garnering of hundreds of lines from many poets and using only those lines, those voices, to form each poem into an authentic whole. It is a complicated and arduous method of writing collage. Claeys is an expert—the narrative is seamless. The collaboration of voices and the craft of the poet render a book of resilience and hope—“a reminder that this is the one world / which is everyone, everywhere, always.”
Review by Carol Sadtler in RHINO REVIEWS
THE MACHINERY OF GRACE
rhinopoetry.org/reviews/the-machinery-of-grace-edited-by-patrice-boyer-claeys-reviewed-by-carol-sadtler
So many mothers in one—the mother who raised you, the woman she was before you came along, the one who stays with you after she’s gone. In The Machinery of Grace, Patrice Boyer Claeys masterfully winnows and combines borrowed lines from a wide range of poets to create centos that illuminate the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship.
Work begun as she mourned her mother’s death, Claeys’ poems recall her at various stages of life, from “When she turned 19, her beautiful body ran full out,” to her demise, as she “feels the cold—/ lips, toes and fingers like pale blue orchids, / her eyes half closed and flat gray.” As a mother herself, the poet can “reconstruct her—her sorrow and pleasure equally manifest / a part of her always / rolling cookie dough into balls / wanting to be sure / she would teach us to be a mother.”
Claeys’ ability to inhabit both ends of a mother-daughter connection in the space of one poem sets the reader squarely into the intimacy of the relationship. In her first book, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering, about an adoptive mother whose daughter struggles with mental disorders, “The child stirs, / gazes through / the sheen of sleep, / reaches toward / the wet face / of the / stand-in love, / to close the space between.”
The structure of The Machinery of Grace is organic in its process of loss, grief, memory and acceptance. Transcendence runs throughout. As the mother lets go, her daughter urges her to “Keep going forward / into the pocket of air, / like morning through split curtains / and gold hidden in satin.”
With the precision of a jeweler, Claeys sets gems into precious metal to create a new piece. After articulating the pain that comes with loss and the mixed feelings of remembering, the poems move into a joy that comes as the mourner returns to herself to celebrate earthly pleasures. There is delight in “A day like eggshell,” or “Two people talking / full of simple, joyful melody,” or, simply, “the click, the whir, the eddying forward.”
Carol Sadtler is a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Pacific Review, RHINO, The Tishman Review, Hartskill Review, The Maine Review and other publications. She has served as an associate editor for RHINO poetry and is an active member of a local poetry group, Plumb Line Poets.
THE MACHINERY OF GRACE
rhinopoetry.org/reviews/the-machinery-of-grace-edited-by-patrice-boyer-claeys-reviewed-by-carol-sadtler
So many mothers in one—the mother who raised you, the woman she was before you came along, the one who stays with you after she’s gone. In The Machinery of Grace, Patrice Boyer Claeys masterfully winnows and combines borrowed lines from a wide range of poets to create centos that illuminate the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship.
Work begun as she mourned her mother’s death, Claeys’ poems recall her at various stages of life, from “When she turned 19, her beautiful body ran full out,” to her demise, as she “feels the cold—/ lips, toes and fingers like pale blue orchids, / her eyes half closed and flat gray.” As a mother herself, the poet can “reconstruct her—her sorrow and pleasure equally manifest / a part of her always / rolling cookie dough into balls / wanting to be sure / she would teach us to be a mother.”
Claeys’ ability to inhabit both ends of a mother-daughter connection in the space of one poem sets the reader squarely into the intimacy of the relationship. In her first book, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering, about an adoptive mother whose daughter struggles with mental disorders, “The child stirs, / gazes through / the sheen of sleep, / reaches toward / the wet face / of the / stand-in love, / to close the space between.”
The structure of The Machinery of Grace is organic in its process of loss, grief, memory and acceptance. Transcendence runs throughout. As the mother lets go, her daughter urges her to “Keep going forward / into the pocket of air, / like morning through split curtains / and gold hidden in satin.”
With the precision of a jeweler, Claeys sets gems into precious metal to create a new piece. After articulating the pain that comes with loss and the mixed feelings of remembering, the poems move into a joy that comes as the mourner returns to herself to celebrate earthly pleasures. There is delight in “A day like eggshell,” or “Two people talking / full of simple, joyful melody,” or, simply, “the click, the whir, the eddying forward.”
Carol Sadtler is a freelance writer and editor in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Pacific Review, RHINO, The Tishman Review, Hartskill Review, The Maine Review and other publications. She has served as an associate editor for RHINO poetry and is an active member of a local poetry group, Plumb Line Poets.
REVIEW OF THE MACHINERY OF GRACE AT SUNDRESS PUBLICATIONS BY ANA WOFFORD
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW OF LOVELY DAUGHTER OF THE SHATTERING BY CAROLE MERTZ
“Child” (16), nevertheless, sears through a violent scene and shows us that, by decision, the mother will prevail.
So, my precious child, rail on.
I will survive the choking doubt that sends me down
this slope of pain, that rounds my shoulders
as I lightly pat for broken glass.
I will hold fast.
Read more:
momeggreview.com/2019/04/25/lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-by-patrice-boyer-claeys/
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW OF LOVELY DAUGHTER OF THE SHATTERING BY SURY GOSCH
Claeys takes us on a mesmerizing journey of parenting a child with mental illness, describing the first love of a mother and her child at the adopting agency — “We’re in this thing like leaves, like sandwich halves. Neither of us live without the other” — through the time when the mother now witnesses her daughter becoming a teenage parent. The mother affectionately observes her teenage daughter as the latter tends to her son: “She dresses him with care, cuing the blue of his sleeper to the flecks on her acrylic nails — as if they’re off to a photo shoot instead of the sofa.”
Read more: trampset.org/book-review-lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-eea8775437d7
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW OF LOVELY DAUGHTER OF THE SHATTERING BY SHERRY SMITH
And then there are the eleven lovely centos, lines adopted from other poets, yet resonant with the voice of this poet. Perhaps they are a metaphor for this blended family forged by choice, not birth, and being fraught with seeking balance in honoring the original poetry and finding one's own way. Adrienne Rich said, "Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know."
Read more: rhinopoetry.org/reviews/lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-by-patrice-boyer-claeys-reviewed-by-sherry-smith
“Child” (16), nevertheless, sears through a violent scene and shows us that, by decision, the mother will prevail.
So, my precious child, rail on.
I will survive the choking doubt that sends me down
this slope of pain, that rounds my shoulders
as I lightly pat for broken glass.
I will hold fast.
Read more:
momeggreview.com/2019/04/25/lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-by-patrice-boyer-claeys/
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW OF LOVELY DAUGHTER OF THE SHATTERING BY SURY GOSCH
Claeys takes us on a mesmerizing journey of parenting a child with mental illness, describing the first love of a mother and her child at the adopting agency — “We’re in this thing like leaves, like sandwich halves. Neither of us live without the other” — through the time when the mother now witnesses her daughter becoming a teenage parent. The mother affectionately observes her teenage daughter as the latter tends to her son: “She dresses him with care, cuing the blue of his sleeper to the flecks on her acrylic nails — as if they’re off to a photo shoot instead of the sofa.”
Read more: trampset.org/book-review-lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-eea8775437d7
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW OF LOVELY DAUGHTER OF THE SHATTERING BY SHERRY SMITH
And then there are the eleven lovely centos, lines adopted from other poets, yet resonant with the voice of this poet. Perhaps they are a metaphor for this blended family forged by choice, not birth, and being fraught with seeking balance in honoring the original poetry and finding one's own way. Adrienne Rich said, "Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know."
Read more: rhinopoetry.org/reviews/lovely-daughter-of-the-shattering-by-patrice-boyer-claeys-reviewed-by-sherry-smith