When Word and Image Run Away: The Selected Poems of Mary Blinn

As is our tradition, After Hours magazine held a contributors' reading in August of 2015, celebrating the release of Summer Issue #31. Quraysh Ali Lansana was the featured writer in that issue, and was also the featured reader at the event. This contributors' reading, however, was a little different, because it also celebrated the poetry of After Hours regular contributor, featured writer (Issue #17), and friend Mary Blinn. Mary's sudden death just two months before had greatly saddened the Chicago poetry community. That afternoon, several After Hours readers began their sets with one or two of Mary's poems. They brought to life Mary's voice, her poetic music, and her words. Quraysh (a poet, writer, teacher, editor, and one of After Hours' most distinguished featured writers) was immediately taken with Mary's poetry and made the strong suggestion that a collection of her poetry needed to exist, to make sure such a wonderful Chicago poetic voice would continue to be heard and read. Thus began the spark that drove the creation of the book you hold in your hands. Through the careful cataloging of Mary's files, her husband Robert Blinn made the bulk of her work available to the editors. The result, When Word and Image Run Away, is a selection of Mary Blinn's finest poems, many of which were published in the pages of After Hours. Some of the illustrations, also by Mary, had appeared previously in After Hours as well.

In a way, it is hard to read the poems of Mary Blinn because virtually every line stuns with its imagery blazing so that you cannot look away, and you feel the need to savor a new revelation. There are real shadows here, as in life, but with an eye toward dawn, like the separate bathrobes of both parents discovered after their death and "Removing his favorite flannel from the hook, / I place it, facing hers, on a hanger. / I tie them together, arm to arm." Another reads as an ars poetica as mother and daughter compare their painting: "We'd argue about blending colors, painting / the strangeness of a day like today when her / thoughts were the opaque certainty of oils / and mine, transparent layers of watercolor." Blinn is no mere observer of nature, but a Sister who allows its reality to pass through her, but changed, charged with color, her own color, as with the month of October when trees "lose their strength these last few weeks . . . resigned to display a / different, bony kind of beauty; listen to a / wisdom hidden deep in the root that whispers / your work is complete / your season has passed." Wise as Athene, or more truly, as a child, she leads us "through diamond / puddles left between the verses of an April storm / dances dances dances until stones turn soft / beneath her feet, blur like ink on wrinkled paper." Mary Blinn's poems will capture your soul, and you will not want to be let go. - Larry Janowski poet, teacher, Franciscan friar