In the calendar of certain western Christian religions — most notably the Roman Catholic and Anglican denominations — ember days are times of prayer and fasting that occur four times during the year, on the successive Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the beginning of the four seasons of the church year. They are intended as intervals in our lives to give thanks for blessings received (in particular for the gifts of nature) and to ask for further graces in the season ahead.
That brief definition provides a fitting context to appreciate Mary Gilliland’s most recent poetry collection — the eagerly awaited Ember Days from Codhill Press — its three-part grouping of poems, and its themes of spirituality in a material world and hope in a world gone mad.
Gilliland prefaces the collection with an Introit of sorts to her poetic liturgy — the poem “Offering the Body: The Tibetan Practice of Chöd.” That final word in the poem’s title refers to a Buddhist practice that focuses on cutting through one’s attachment to the body and to the ego. The poem is in itself a ritual of spiritual cleansing that sounds the keynote for what is to follow in the book: the eternal struggle between selflessness and world, sanctity and temptation:
I see no stopping to the world
but there is respite from the demons
that arise daily in the head.
The book’s three-part grouping of poems is just and fitting. Gilliland aptly names those sections Wednesday’s, Friday’s, and Saturday’s. The first, subtitled “jammed boulevards,” is emblematic of the world of busy commerce that can distract the poet, or any saintly seeker, from her soul’s true purpose.
In “For When Nothing Is Remembered,” Gilliland explores the tension between past values and present realities which the modern world has created:
On the eighth day we looked on and realized
it wasn’t good anymore. Where did they go,
the shared rituals? We buy greeting cards
that could be sent to anyone….
And in “If God Were to Die,” the tension is between the world of spirit and the world of commerce: “At least we would still have St. Nicholas,” Gilliland writes rather sarcastically. For her, referencing the church’s canonized name for Santa Claus does little to compensate for the loss of the spiritual significance of Christmas due to its over-commercialization.
In the end, though, to the negatively phrased question posed in “Is a Transcendently Beautiful Place Not to Be Ours?” Gilliland offers both a hopeful vision of the church militant and a call to a higher purpose:
How many can rise to the side of the saints
and float among the rocks in a white dress?
In the century
after steam, then the century after flight
mortals will rebuild, sight rocks to float among.
In the middle section of Ember Days (Friday’s: cash worthless), the poet’s soul turns inward in poems characterized by memory and personal reflection. Even in cases where reflection leads to the key for addressing the world’s ills, the poet is often powerless to act effectively. One such example is the humorously titled “Perhaps I Left the Car at Big Lots,” which Gilliland begins with the question “Where is calm, peace, / absence of war?” and ends with the line “I’ve found the keys. But I can’t leave.”
Several poems in this section deal with the poet’s memories of a burgeoning sense of self-identity as a young person. In the poem “Dry Dock,” for example, Gilliland recalls her first days as a college student moving into dorm room:
Unpacking, part of me discarded
the nametag sewn in each collar
and the major I had declared
And in “Miracle Miles,” she reaffirms her freedom of self-identity:
In the American tradition of realism
I do not live where I was born.
One self or another
I make as I go along.
The most masterful of these poems of memory and reflection is “1961 Springfield Ave.” There, Gilliland deftly weaves in and out of three time periods, as she recalls being a girl of ten encountering an earlier time in history. In that poem, she and an adolescent accomplice leave the corner soda fountain, where they would “face Betty and Veronica in the comics racks,” and enter an abandoned mansion, in which they find a copy of a woman’s magazine dated 1895. As an adult, Gilliland remembers the girl she was then and her thoughts about the more distant past:
I thought about young women who in 1895
began to queue for factory workshifts
instead of household service
In the collection’s final section (Saturday’s: prodigal feet), Gilliland continues to mine the depths of history, legend, and an intriguing blend of Christian and eastern religions to complete the rich mythic context for her meditation on the book’s central themes.
In the poem “Lincoln in Another Bardo,” she envisions the assassinated president hovering in a Tibetan state of existence between death and rebirth and prophesying to any willing listener: “The arc of history could bend with you.”
Works in this portion of the book give readers a sense that civilization as a whole is in limbo and waiting for a new age to be born. In “For the Record,” Gilliland writes this:
In my prime on the street I danced a hymn to fire
as cloverleaf highways overtook truck farms
and oil storage tanks topped the estuaries.
My dance gained neither wing nor following
from one war to the next….
That new age Gilliland envisions in the litany of blessings that comprise the collection’s final poem, which concludes:
May you be forcible within your heart
May your fertile regions not be barbarized, nor your large populations
May you dine in restaurants and work in offices
May the light enlarge thy days
May God occupy thy country
On her personal ember days, these are the further graces Gilliland asks for in the season of life and civilization ahead.
Mary Gilliland
Mary Gilliland’s first full-length book, The Devil’s Fools, was published by Codhill Press in November of 2022 and won the Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award. A chapbook, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, appeared in 2020. Her poetry has also been widely published in print and online literary journals and anthologized in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 annual; Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands.
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