Poetry Book Review: Maya Janson
from the Santa Fe New Mexican, September 23, 2022
ON THE MERCY ME PLANET by Maya Janson, Blue Edge Books, 62 pages, $16
The poems in On the Mercy Me Planet are the work of a mature poet at the top of her game, yet this is Maya Janson’s second book, selected by Santa Fe’s Blue Edge Books as its inaugural publication. Mercy has a little something for everyone, both in subject and in tone. Janson writes of the personal but reaches outside of the poems, finding connections between her own frailties and those of the world. She can be lyrical, bouncing along the page, as well as almost crudely evocative, and also mysterious, with no clear intent. Sometimes, she is all at once, as in “Big Web, Spider Gone,” which starts “Wet ash of a peed on, doused fire./Drop-down menu, thirteen ways//of not knowing how — /how to form the mouth to say it —//how to pry the seed from the finches beak/without causing breakage.”
Janson hones in on a scene or memory and then constructs the poem in a side-to-side-manner, juxtaposing images or ideas in a way that pushes the poem away and then pulls it closer, line by line. “I hold your picture up to the light/not to find flaws but to locate the essential,” she writes in “Filaments Visible.” “If to love is to imagine you can forestall/the inevitable, bestow on the blank sky//some clouds — then imagine. Bestow./Spread fog into low-lying valleys.//Send someone home early by way of/short-cut on a borrowed bike at dusk.”