Incarnate Grace

by Moira Linehan

Overview

In her collection Incarnate Grace, poet Moira Linehan explores, questions, and ultimately celebrates her attempt to live in the temple of the present.

After learning she has breast cancer, the poet struggles to live an examined life. Alienated and estranged from her own body, she turns her cancer into “these binoculars, / this new way of looking,” and uses it as a way of fixing herself firmly within the moment. As she travels Ireland and the Pacific Northwest, her busy mind moves from the knot in her breast to the knots in her knitting to the illuminated knots of The Book of Kells to the tossing, knotted surface of the sea; from the margins of her surgery—clean but not ideal—to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. She links the mundane to the mythic, intertwining connections between scripture and nature, storms and loss, winter and light, breast cancer and embroidery. As she returns to her home on a small pond in Massachusetts, she takes with her the fruits of her travels: the incarnate grace of the ordinary.  

Vivid and compelling, Incarnate Grace finds beauty in the worst of circumstances and redemption in the fabric of daily life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809333899
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/16/2015
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Moira Linehan is the author of If No Moon, winner of the 2006 Crab Or­chard Series in Poetry Open Competition and an Honor Book in Poetry in the 2008 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her poetry has appeared in America, Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Quiddity, Salaman­der, Southwest Review, Image, Prairie Schooner, and many others.

  

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I

Praise Him in the Temple of the Present 3

No Say 4

Winter Pond 6

Approaching 60 7

Naming It 8

Balling Yarn 9

Scraping the Blackened Bottom 11

In the Keep of the Body 12

Electric 13

Healing 14

Late Prayer 15

Against the Slow-Falling Snow 16

Marginal 17

The Plumber Said 18

That Moment 19

Halfway through Radiation 20

Calling 21

Wild Swans at Winter Pond 22

II[the way you used to enter] 25

Learning to Travel 27

The Pacific Madrone 28

The Habits of California Quails 29

Birding Trip, Early February, Southwest British Columbia 30

Breast Cancer 180 31

Ferry 32

Sounding It Out 33

Knitting at Annaghmakerrig 34

The Monks Who Made The Book of Kells 35

The Art of Manuscript Illumination 36

The Theology of Manuscript Illumination 37

Crossing Over 38

Cill Rialaig Elemental 40

L'Heure Bleue at Ballinskelligs Bay 41

journey to Skellig Michael 42

To Elijah, at Ballinskelhgs 44

The Sea Here, Teaching Me, 46

III

Brushes 49

Japanese Wall Hanging 50

The Space Between 51

Predestination 52

Vocation 54

At Sainte-Chapelle 55

Forty Years Ago 56

Waiting Room 57

Woman Ironing 58

Knitting Lace 59

For the Men Who Fish along Horn Pond 60

Our Nature 61

On Notice 62

My Great Blue 63

For the One Who Still Lives inside Me- 64

Winged Woman Walking, 65

After the Storm 66

Last Wishes 67

A Deep Wound 68

Notes 71

Editorial Reviews

“Although illness is at the heart of Moira Linehan’s fine new collection, the overriding sense left by these poems is of an eager imagination at full tilt, transmitting through grounded yet buoyant language a moving sense of what it’s like to live in a world of shadows and yet continue to reach for the light. Here is a poet wide awake to the perpetually shifting character of the world—a world containing nature, art, and the human dilemmas forged by sickness or simply by time.While illness alerts her mind and sharpens her voice, Linehan confronts her hard facts as well as her deeply observed, fully suffered, loved world without flinching—converting all (an episode of radiation, a work of Japanese art, an Irish or an American landscape) into her own quickened language of scrupulous attention.”—Eamon Grennan

“I must be satisfied with my heart, wrote the aging Yeats, who well understood this vow to be a fraught and even terrifying one. Moira Linehan writes of transience and mortality with a Yeatsian delicacy and a Yeatsian ferocity. And in response to the imperiling mysteries of cancer and aging, she offers lyrics of hard-won insight, clarity, and astonishment. The nervy purpose of these poems is to celebrate, as she puts it in one poem, ‘this body, here for the inevitable / disappearing and . . . soothing / a throat left raw by the unspeakable.’ This is a superbly crafted book by a wise and fearless maker.”—David Wojahn

“From a place of illness and ‘no say’ to an incredibly rich music, Moira Linehan takes us on a journey, a pilgrimage, in fact, as these fine poems move through restorative landscapes, both outer—New England, the Pacific Northwest, Ireland—and inner, that place ‘so far it’s the only place left.’ What emerges is indeed a vision of grace. Linehan’s fine-tuned eye gives us the natural world in stunning detail, and the glimmer of something beyond. Her language is rich and palpable, able to catch what is always just slipping away and stitch it into something that holds. Incarnate Grace is a book to cherish.”—Betsy Sholl
 

“If you’ve had breast cancer, breathing while reading these holy poems is difficult, sometimes impossible. If you’re a poet, their breath inflates your lungs with pure pleasure. If you love brilliant poems, you’re a reader. Please read this book!”—Hilda Raz

From the Publisher

03/15/2015
A former high school English teacher, Linehan was diagnosed in 2009 with invasive lobular breast cancer: "The kind that likes to hide./ That likes to move on to the other breast." As she views nature from her Massachusetts window: "What I could not name save for these binoculars,/ this new way of looking. This breast cancer." Her title is divided into sections that move from home to family home in Ireland to travels beyond in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, viewing fishermen, lacemakers, knitters, kestrels and peregrines, an art museum. Her husband died of cancer prior to her diagnosis, and his loss is apparent here as well. She speaks of wounds: "The one thing we're said to have in common,/ those of us with breast cancer: a deep wound….// Now at Cill Rialaig, I see how land, too,/ can hold a deep wound…. I left Boston on the Feast of All Saints,/ arrived here the Feast of All Souls.// …So tonight,// …let them visit me on this/ grieving gray rock. Let them bind up my deep wound./ Let them caress the scar beneath my right breast/ that never stops aching. Let them, if just for this night." VERDICT Linehan's (If No Moon) work is razor sharp and affecting. More than just a cancer journal, she's crafted a skein of life that connects us all. For all collections.—Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Library Journal