Marie Howe

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time

Poems

An anticipated new volume from Marie Howe whose “poetry is luminous, intense, eloquent, rooted in abundant inner life” (Stanley Kunitz).

Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those periods that are not apparently miraculous?

from “Prologue”

People generally worshiped where their parents
had worshiped—
The men who’d hijacked the airplane prayed where the dead pilots had been sitting,
and the passengers prayed from their seats ...
People, listening and watching, nodded and wept, and, leaving the theater,
one turned to the other and said, What do you want to do now?
And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do?
It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. ...

Marie Howe is the author of The Good Thief and What the Living Do. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.