Living Proof by Mary Bonina
Cervena Barva Press

Review by Jen Garfield

Mary Bonina’s Living Proof is a hefty 45 pages and worth every drop of ink Cervena Barva Press shelled out to bring it into the world. Each poem reads like a miniature story, stabbing at the heart of memory and nostalgia, capturing lifetimes in a single moment or turn of phrase.

A staple in Boston’s literary scene, Bonina has a poem inscribed on a granite monolith permanently installed outside the Green Street subway station on the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority orange line. I’ve lived in Massachusetts for a few years now, and can attest to the fine job Bonina does inhabiting the landscape—the drive through Lexington Green, Nahant on the North Shore, the sweet peas in Cambridge. And no collection set in the Commonwealth would be complete without a nod to the white swans in the Public Gardens; so she ushers in the necessity without fanfare, wrapping it up with surprising, understated eloquence:

Once I watched a toddler tumble down
from a third-story porch, rolling
and rolling down the dirt bank
to the sidewalks, and later pronounced okay.

A few of the bunch fall flat, like “Hart’s Neck,” where it was hard to convince myself to care about Bonina’s mid-morning run through suburbia. But by far, her inquisitive, precocious son steals the spotlight when he asks “Mom, what’s a heart?” He even mistakes the “Washington” on the radio for George Washington himself, and is disappointed to learn his hero is already dead. Bonina asks, “Why be a spoiler and feed the boy until he is full of facts?/ It happens soon enough anyway.”

Indeed, while these poems are rooted in a history and place, they are loose where facts are concerned. The truth is not what can be researched and documented, but what is felt with the heart through many years of reflection. Observing the Children’s Orchestra Rehearsal, Bonina notes:

So close, so tense, so rich.
The harmony is not open.
Compare this with anything
you ever did in your life,
with the Paganini we did last week,
with any of Bach.

Bonina’s poems don’t just open up the world around us, they narrow in on things of true importance. Just as her son was disappointed to learn about Washington, I was sad to say goodbye to his innocent quirkiness and read he had grown up to start whistling in his “new body at fourteen.” But I gained solace in the poems that follow the revelation, and I think I know what Bonina means when she writes in “Gifts”:

I like the feeling of having what I think I’ll need,
which is what happens when the freezer is full. . . .

. . . Funny,
how the truth will come to you sometimes when
you least expect it . . .

Bonina’s book is full of these little gems of truth; she shows us they pop up everywhere.

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Jen Garfield is the poetry editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her poetry has appeared in  numerous journals and recently, she was the recipient of a 2007 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. Her chapbook, Excuses for Happiness, is forthcoming from Pudding House Press.  This week, she likes Greek mythology, advice columns, and shih tzus. 

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