A Review of Margaret Hoehn's "Five Prayers of Apples"

Title: Five Prayers of Apples by Margaret Hoehn
Publisher: Spire Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-934828-07-6
Reviewed by Emmanuel Sigauke


Five Prayers of Apples is an inspiring collection of beautifully crafted poems. The poet encourages us to see hope in the least expected places, even in broken glass. The collection starts with the poem “What Softly Calls Back”, which reminds us that “the world reaches out / to comfort itself”. This search for comfort, the need to register a presence, is not a passive one. The poet tells us that “even the parts we thought / were mute are more poem / than we could have imagined.” It’s the complexity of life often disguised by plainness and unpredictability. All things around us, trees, grass, rocks, birds, are full of this richness of life; they sing it, whether we pay attention or not, but in not paying attention we lose out on a lot that would enrich us.

Important messages about life are everywhere, even in the language of our wounds or in “those long / silences that we have endured”, which are not silences, but “psalms and blessings / and offerings of encouragement / and hope.” All we need to do is learn to hear what the silence is telling us. When we reach this point of hearing the inaudible, of seeking sound where silence rules, we will be closer to discovering the hope that abounds around us.

In “The Topography of Motion”, the poet tells us that motion always tells a story. Any form of movement is important as it goes hand in hand with change. Life is motion. To live is to be in a constant state of movement, and it doesn’t matter whether the movement is a going (somewhere) or a return. Departure becomes indistinguishable from arrival. Even memory is in a constant state of transformation; what matters is that the motion continues to “chime” and every moment is “a bird/already flying beyond reach.” Here we see the consistency of movement, and the deeper concentration needed to decipher the movements that imitate the beat of life, whose progression like that of the seasons, forever departing, but always returning.

These poems celebrate life, whose manifestation is sometimes seen through even the most fragmentary piece of evidence and various “intricate puzzle[s]”. The world demands that we constantly fit the puzzles of our lives together. Perhaps this task should make us appreciate life more, and ,as the poet does, “by will alone…make this exquisite, / fractured world almost whole.” Of course, there is no perfection, but there is the satisfaction that the episodes of life we have so far puzzled together help us desire more puzzles which come as hours, days, months, years. That, the poet seems to be saying, is the ultimate appreciation of life.

This is not even a romanticized view of life, but an honest message about what it means to be human, and to be alive, this process in which we should be willing to “drown in the sadness and beauty of this world / in order to live.” In “Travelling without a Map”, one of my favorite poems in the collection, the persona ponders about the nature of human relationships, remembered in the context of travel. A physical journey remembered parallels the emotional journey in the persona’s personal relationship. Even though the couple inhabits different and increasingly divergent emotional plains, the persona realizes that sometimes in travelling, it is often difficult to separate departure from arrival. After a while, it does not matter whether one is arriving or departing because these two “can flow / side by side without touching / as they leave each other behind.” This poem reconnects to the idea of how silence can draw two people closer to each other, thereby helping them achieve emotional reunification.

These poems are full of hope, reminding us to pay attention to the objects we often ignore, which might enrich our understanding of life. The message is written in everything around us, how the random spill of apples from a torn grocery bag can lead to thoughts of “the sudden / and ordinary way that beauty / or loss appears in our lives”. Even artists like Cezanne (invoked in the title poem) have always deciphered these subliminal messages from simple, almost invisible objects. The poet here asks if loneliness allowed the artist to hear the stories of apples, stories of “gratitude and despair”. Triggered by the loss of rotting apples, the art of Cezanne, as celebrated by the poet, was a search of beauty so intense that also it sought to make time stand still, or to “stop the world from turning”, to help an epiphany reveal itself. I detect in these poems the need to take a more active role in the making of meaning in order to understand our world.

I enjoyed these poems, which are full of music. On the page they look simple, but as you reread, because they are rendered beautifully, you are taken to a higher level of thinking. This simplicity is not even deceptive, it doesn’t desire to be, but it is something deliberate, something meant to lift you to a higher level of understanding, or if no new understanding is attained, at least to a new way of thinking about apples, silence, shadows, darkness, travel, relationships, and rivers. Margaret Hoehn is a gentle philosopher, raising questions, answering them, and raising more and not answering them.

This review is scheduled to appear in Poetry Now, a publication of the Sacramento Poetry Center

Margaret Hoehn, who recently read at the Sacramento Poetry Center.

Margaret Hoehn lives with her husband and two children in Sacramento, where she practiced law for many years, then spent a decade volunteering with a hospice. She presently volunteers with a medical library. Her poetry has appeared in Atlantic Review, Bellingham Review, Margie, Nimrod, North American Review and many other journals. She is the author of four award winning chapbooks of poetry: Vanishings (Writer’s Voice, Tampa Metropolitan YMCA, 1998); Changing Shapes (Wind Publications, 2000); Balancing on Light (Riverstone Press, 2002); and Traveling Without a Map (Anabiosis Press, 2005). Her first book of poetry, The Trajectory of Sunflowers (The Backwaters Press, 2004), won the Readers’ Choice Award. In 2009, a volume of her collected work, Trajectories, was published by The Legal Studies Forum. Five Prayers of Apples is her latest chapbook, which is part of the InSPIREd Poetry Series (Spire Press, New York, 2009). She is a past winner of the Tor House Prize in Poetry and has received three Pushcart nominations.