Recalibrating Gravity
Mary Keating
Woodhall Press (2024)
ISBN: 978-1960456151
Reviewed by Justin Gaynor for Reader Views (01/2025)
Poetry is often considered an art form that lives in the realm of feelings and emotions. Mary Keating takes a different approach in her masterful “Recalibrating Gravity.” More than half of the poems in this collection simply tell a story, with a minimum of fuss and bother. The catch? The stories themselves are so heart-rending or tender or funny that they don’t need to talk about emotion. The emotion is right there, happening to the reader while he or she reads this.
Everybody has stories to tell, but the stories here seem to come from a life that’s been magnified. In bits and pieces, we learn of an alcoholic mother and distant father; a car crash at age 15 that left the author confined to a wheelchair; romance and marriage and sports. She is not only a poet, she is a Yale-trained attorney, avid scuba diver, nature lover, cancer survivor, and loving wife.
About that: Like all marriages, there are ups and downs. Her husband appears to suffer from seasonal depression:
Shadows invade
(from “Hibernal Solstice,” p. 121)
his lightness of being
when the sun’s too lazy
to climb very far
above the horizon…
… When he reemerges
with the energized sun,
he’ll have missed her
little bits of heaven—
the moments of happiness
she crafted from emptiness
She won’t mention
how her poetry saved
them—each poem
a surrogate sun
Far more typical, though, are simple stories related in verse. Some of these address her disability, such as What Makes a Human Human (pp. 89-91), in which a law professor compares a four-legged dog with a three-legged dog, and then asks, “What is the difference between the three-legged dog and the real dog?,” denying the author’s very humanity. There are also numerous examples of playful word formatting on the page, with poems in the shape of a butterfly (In God’s Hands, pp. 62-65) or an ouroboros (An Ouroborous Frayed, p. 106) or even a wheelchair-bound poet (Still, p. 96).
While most of the language is straightforward, occasionally she exhibits interesting internal rhyming and alliteration, such as
We’d pop a plump olive in our mouth
(From Olives, p. 19)
Suck hard until the pimento slipped out
Suck out all the juice – straining
the muscles around our jaws
Flay the olive inside our maws by
scraping the flesh with our incisors
with the precision of a plastic surgeon
Suck again until its skin
rolled paper thin and then,
and only then, chew.
That final “chew” lands like a well-placed arrow.
These pages reward the reader with the wisdom and heart of a writer who has lived far more than most of us, despite her setbacks. Whether celebrating the arrival of spring or the elegiac feel of autumn, loving her dogs, or hating her chemo, Keating is a poet to be reckoned with.