MEASURELESS SILENCE by CHRISTINE MULVEY

“There is a music in these poems that works magic with the particularity of the images to create a whole body experience out of which willows, swans and bison rise as if from within our own being, untamed and untameable. In Measureless Silence, Christine Mulvey has composed a symphony of words that sings the wonder and devastation that is our world.  Each poem is a summons, whether through the “wrap of forest” or the harsh light of “glitz and bling”, to discover ourselves as the wild itself: pristine, ravaged, and innocent as snow, as wings, as wind.

–Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: the Transformative Power of Words

Cris Mulvey‘s Measureless Silence is an ode to the vast, wild open spaces of Montana and the Western United States, and also to the wildness within. In gorgeous, lyrical language and sensuous imagery, she celebrates “everything uncaptured,/ undefiled/…all that cannot be,/ that still refuses/ to be/ tamed.” Mountains, prairies, bison, rivers “and this sky,/ unfathomable,/ thundering/with magnificent/indifference”—these are the true protagonists of these poems, while the self becomes vulnerable and insignificant, yet also finds itself at home in this stark wilderness, seen in winter. By contrast, the poems set in cityscapes show a tawdry poverty of soul there, in which the narrator feels “hollow-boned with longing” to return to the wild. “Come with me out to where the soft round shapes/ of the fallen snow lie draped across the bushes like the thighs/ and hips of a sleeping god curled up on the open bedspread of the land,” Mulvey invites, and we are eager to follow her through this beautiful collection of poems.

–Maxima Kahn, author of Fierce Aria.

This poet knows the wild. In this collection she invites us to trust our senses and our longing, to enter a sacristy of sensuality and song, to remember what is holy in the untamed within and without. Even in the few poems where the soulless isolation of the city or human intervention reminds us of our own separation, the poet returns us over and over to the sacred and the sensuous, to mystery, lifting our eyes from our lowly state to something more, to our connection with everything uncaptured, to the wild, to the “feral silence” of heaven on earth.

–Mary Jo Amani, MFA, Pacific University.