Poetry by Marjorie Maddox, reviewed by Lynn Levin
SEEING THINGS (Wildhouse Publishing)

Marjorie Maddox’s newest collection of poems Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025) is a stylistic tour de force that sometimes directly and often slantwise bravely engages very difficult themes: an artist daughter’s battles with mental illness, an elderly mother’s dementia, and the plague of sexual violence. It also comforts us with poems about love. A strong current of maternal and filial devotion runs through these poems. With all their painful subject matter, the poems, which come in free verse and formal verse, show us that being in the lives of those we love is the most important thing we do. I see goodness in these poems, and we need more goodness in poetry. Seeing Things is Majorie Maddox’s seventeenth collection of poems. The recipient of many literary and academic honors, Maddox is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, and in addition to being a poet, she is an anthologist, short story writer, host of a poetry radio show, and children’s book author. 

The spirit of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of the mentally ill and victims of incest, looks over many of these poems, especially the ones about the depression suffered by Maddox’s daughter and the poems about sexual abuse. In “Seeing Things,” the title poem, Maddox pairs the imagery of light with a swift collision of slant and truncated images to illuminate the ambiguities and vagaries of a troubled mind:

Just like that the invisible shifts to visible,
reality’s bold finger of light
taps something here in the mind, dimmed
fear suddenly spotlighted, its name
elusive but its image clear-faced and whole
like the hallucinations once hidden

in my daughter’s brain, no longer hidden.

These lines that evoke the shadows and sparkings of the mind are poetically beautiful, but they also convey the combination of terror and awe that come when irrational forces take over one’s perception. 

I am especially impressed by Maddox’s use, seen mostly in her free verse poems, of fractured and rapidly shifting phrases to express tumult and trauma. Here are a few lines from “Details,” a poem about the rape of a young girl:

The age? Sometime before
grown, before scream, before
bedtime story, before this is how
you were born. The person?
Does it matter? The hand?
The right one. The room? Dark
And darkening …

How else to write the victim’s helplessness and pain but through this real-time broken narration? The author’s slantwise approach, use of noun phrases as questions, and unusual grammatical choices (for example “before grown” as a way of saying “young”) toss the reader into the moment of violation, conveying empathy, pathos, and pain – both clearly and poetically. 

Just as impressive is Maddox’s formal skill. The author gifts us with sonnets, triolets, and other forms. One of my favorites is “A few moments after a fall at her assisted living facility, my mother forgets.” Maddox adapts the pantoum form, with its pattern of repeating and interwoven lines, to recreate the sense of mixed-up time and memory and the startled aide’s wish to rewind the moment.  

…the fallen body back in the tub, on the stool.
The second before, the aide is soaping the thin torso;
the second after, she is reaching too late the frail body
sprawled on the cold floor. The daughter comes running.

The second before, the aide soaps the thin torso,
turns to adjust the spray, then the clatter,
the naked woman sprawled on the cold floor. The daughter running

By the end of the poem, the mother’s dementia lets her forget the whole incident. 

While Maddox refuses to flinch away from life’s most difficult moments, her poems also make space for beauty and joy. Seeing Things includes a number of praises and odes, among them an ode to her daughter as a painter, an ode to everyday noises, and one that makes me smile each time I read it: “Ode to Husband as Fanatic,” a funny and witty poem that catalogs the husband’s joyful pursuits and favorite things, such as the “secret concoction salmon,” “socks of Red Sox/and Weber logos,” and “Christmas prime rib.” The deliriously happy “Ode to Everything” is not to be missed. In a collection that engages painful subjects head on, the odes sparkle with cheerful light.

The spiritual is very much a part of Maddox’s vision, and a number of poems in Seeing Things suggest the presence of the holy and the unseen. Many other poems address what is seen and what must be seen. Marjorie Maddox’s Seeing Things is a collection of brave and beautiful poems informed by the voice of goodness. Read them and read them again.

Lynn Levin is the author of nine books, most recently the short story collection House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020). Her poems have been published in Smartish Pace, Hopkins Review, Scientific American, Boulevard, ONE ART, and elsewhere. She teaches at Drexel University. Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com

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