The Late Hour — Poems by Marjie Giffin

In the tradition of Ann Bradstreet, Marjie Giffin offers us a meditation and a lament in the beautifully crafted The Late Hour. Giffin is one of those women with “truth/on their lips,” a poet with the courage to reflect on all of the noise and darkness of the current world (violence, ageism, sexism, global warming, personal estrangement, “an illness creeping/on a cat’s sly paws”) and still emerge with hope. Thank goodness she has not given in to her impulse “to stay/still and spent.” I find myself responding to her like the wild geese Giffin imagines in “The Plunge,” who are “nodding,/bestowing their respect.”

–Mary M. Brown, Poetry Editor, Flying Island

In her second poetry chapbook The Late Hour, Marjie Giffin ponders the special liminality of older women; the daily tedium of the “unholy work” of homemakers; and the elusive tranquility of solitude in nature. The poet also offers glimpses of intergenerational closeness like the “moist and close” space that the expecting daughter and mother share, or the shared breathing of grandmother and grandson that “rises and falls in tandem.” Such vignettes alternate with speculations about the world outside the poet’s homespace – a world where COVID has taken its toll on human life; where global warming threatens further environmental disasters; and where unhoused people and loiterers are excluded from privileged public spaces. But Marjie Giffin reminds that despite the constantly shifting boundaries that determine the spaces we inhabit – that even in “the late hour” of our lives, it is never too late to keep hoping, and to keep consecrating each moment of collective human life “against the digital clock face.”

–Hiromi Yoshida,  Author of Epicanthus