Sarah Maclay is a poet, performer, essayist and educator.
Her new books are The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance and Nightfall Marginalia.
The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance - Out Now
In a season of unexpected distress, phrases of Modernist poet Hilda Doolittle, along with inspirations from paintings, photographs and dreams, become touchstones and lifeboats, anchoring a framework for navigating shifting love in a world of impinging power imbalance: the “ laserlike” poems of Sarah Maclay’s The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance. Readers with special interests in contemporary poetry, ekphrastic poetry, surrealism, or literature by women may feel especially at home here.
“Laser-like precision and diaphanous beauty have never been so skillfully married as they are in Sarah Maclay’s tribute to modernist poet H.D., a book in which the tension between an extravagant imagination and an almost minimalist mode of writing is ingeniously investigated. Here, ‘every fleck [is] a piece of fire/made pure by its own burning.’ THE H.D. SEQUENCE—A CONCORDANCE is a compelling, even seductive, collection of highly original work. Sarah Maclay is at the top of her game.”
—Gail Wronsky, author of Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems
Advance Praise for The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance
“A glance in a shard of broken mirror reflects a woman’s profile, blurred but still visible, as we see the shifting faces of twin seers, Maclay and H.D., each more powerfully incarnated as they touch across time. Theirs is an essential relationship, an urgent reclamation of feminine power embodied within these poems, poems written as if mandated as one remarkable poet channels another like ‘the sound of the sun burned through the moon.’ A rare & breathtaking collection, it reminds us that death is not supreme, that the language of spiritual truth is a web of glimmering transmissions and that the living poet is made of a continuity. She is ‘the entire snowfall, for the entire time,’ in poems that stun with ‘a danger of fire. /Also a danger of light.’”
—Holaday Mason, author of As if Scattered
“Sarah Maclay’s gorgeous ekphrastic THE H.D. SEQUENCE—A CONCORDANCE reinvents the animated spirit sourced from the body, ‘estranged and freed here’ (as Celan once put it in ‘The Meridian’) for us to experience like, as in these poems, ‘the whole truth lying in the grass,’ where silence also creates a space that defies time, her fabric of insight implied by desire. Both painting and witness, not unlike H.D.’s ‘Some lovely perilous thing,’ these poems merge with the conviction to find an ‘entire snowfall’ of healing as a shifting love dissolves the ontological domain.”
—Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Nervous
Nightfall Marginalia - Out Now
2023 Foreword Indies Finalist for Poetry—a book of nocturnes and ekphrastics, the poem of the dream and the poem as dream, Nightfall Marginalia abandons diurnal constraints . . . Twilit, autumnal, narrowly perched between eros and elegy, prayer and grimoire, here, the tangible—the sensate—becomes an entrance even to barely perceptible mystery. Evocative, intricate, reverent and gorgeous and newly strange, these poems mark a new level of accomplishment for poet Sarah Maclay.
“Sarah Maclay’s dream-voice hums with the energy of heart-body desire and cleanses with the fineness of an excellent mind. These new poems feel gathered from the margins of a night continuously falling, shaped by an intimate twilit voice, starred with mythic images, that speak-sings in many registers. A narrative emerges, centering in a feminine figure both unique and representative of a city and a time. Yet there is no self-mythologizing here. Rather, the poet’s voice discovers itself already in a mythic role in the here and now.”
—James Cushing
Advance Praise for Nightfall Marginalia
“Reading the lush, lyric poems of Sarah Maclay’s stunning new collection, I dwelt for a time in the fair house of possibility. Nightfall Marginalia hovers between the desire for sanctuary, relation, and love—a longing for ‘the joined cathedral of our twinned hearts’—and something more aesthetically elusive, what one speaker has ‘come to recognize as prayer.’ Maclay’s poetry brims with such an exquisite sense of beauty and truth that I hushed in the end with awe. “
—Cynthia Hogue
“Strange as it may seem, sensuality—genuine sensuality—is our one sure access to an honest humility. Color humbles us. Touch chastens us. With a fine artist’s humility (I think of Pierre Bonnard continuing to touch up his paintings on the French museum walls), Sarah Maclay sustains a careful and even reverent contact with the objects and surfaces of our world. The results go far, far beyond mere description. These poems gathered as Nightfall Marginalia amplify the available light and the colors of life, enriching us as we read.”
—Donald Revell
“Finding beauty at the frayed edges of a collapsing world, Maclay’s Nightfall Marginalia is a voluptuous enactment of both a ruminative intuition and an exuberant intelligence. A place to revel, where the fruit is heavy on the vine, each line a velvet cloak to be pulled up—to reveal the mysteries of desire, mortality, the nature(s) of consciousness itself. Blissfully, there are no easy answers here, just a deepening of the questions. One of contemporary poetry’s most compelling sensualists, this is Maclay at the height of her bewitching powers.”
—Louise Mathias
“The sea is dangerous, they say, but not if
you’re the sea.”
—“Ocean in White Chair”