Review: Mary Morris
On Late Self-Portraits by Mary Morris
by Tyler Truman Julian
Mary Morris’ Late Self-Portraits is an artist’s incisive look at her life as she navigates chronic illness, a type of self-portrait itself. Morris’ speaker is adept at navigating intimate and vulnerable moments of illness, high art and history, resulting in the cultivation of a poetry collection that interrogates death, change and art itself. Approaching these large topics with nuance is a challenge for any poet, but approaching it through the lens of a mother with epilepsy, Morris makes unfamiliar moments universal and compelling. In Late Self-Portraits, the reader is led from poem to poem by the maternal hand of the speaker and is always granted a solid footing in the collection’s arc.
Morris’ speaker sets the stakes of Late Self-Portraits early in the collection. She introduces the reader to Salem “witches,” Joan of Arc, Marie Laveau, Marie Curie and other misunderstood women in history to ultimately form a connection between these women and those with epilepsy. “Sometimes we slip out of our bodies,” the speaker explains of those who experience seizures, but this slippage also causes snow to fall “through late night poems” (“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”). The speaker continues, emphasizing how epilepsy serves as a gateway to artistic production and how doctors easily explain this away:
Neurons misfire
Muscles stiffen
Years disappear morph
through synesthesia
(“Sometimes We Slip Out of Our Bodies”)
What doctors see as tragedy and medical emergency, while not romanticized by Morris’ speaker, is in fact the connection point to the mythic women of history that pop in and out of these poems and art itself. This connection begets art and brings solace: “the body is an empire filled with past lives” (“Portrait of Orpheus, Frida Kahlo, Love & Death”). Where else can we turn when faced with pain but to art and story? It’s from these connection points that beautiful things (joy, consolation and art) come. Once the speaker and reader reckon with this reality, they can face death as fully realized individuals:
When death makes its move
close enough to dance
breathing down my neck
I want to tango
fall into its arms
in love with the music
swing low
trust its compass
let go
my breath.
(“Last Tango in Red”)
This acceptance of death and connection to those who have gone before (whether in true history or folklore) only deepens the collection’s narrative arc. The frequent reliance on ekphrasis and narrative further reinforces the themes of the collection, building a community of artists, musicians and storytellers that offer consolation and “tell us / how to draw death close, paint ravens in” (“Rembrandt, Late Self-Portrait”).
The emphasis of dying well that these poems embody is matched by their expectation that the poetic I and, in turn, the reader also live well. For every poem about meeting death with trust, there is a poem about living in a creative state, as a parent, as an artist. This, the speaker tells us, is the only way to live well: Remember your death but remember to live. The speaker leaves us with this reminder, the work of poem craft turning a reflexive you into a command, “you / are hungry, and you eat” (“Act of Faith”).