True, False, None of the Above by Marjorie Maddox
Cascade Books, 2016
There are no trick questions in True, False, None of the Above, the latest full-length poetry collection from Marjorie Maddox. But there are no easy answers either. The first two poems—“On Defining Education” and “How Spiritual Are You?”—combine to form a sort of syllabus for the rest of the book. Maddox sets out to examine her experiences as an educator and poet of faith, yet never becomes pedantic and never seeks to convert. She simply asks questions and lets the reader fill in the blanks.
Please feel free to confront.
I’m not talking about who you should be
but are. . .
To Maddox, a professor of composition and creative writing, education is a matter of stripping away what we think we know and beginning again with questions: “I’ll unteach all / those this = that interpretations.” Even in matters of faith, it’s our inquisitiveness, our sense of wonder, that promotes learning. Other people’s questions are less helpful, as she shows in the second poem’s Time Magazine quiz: “Where is the ‘stranger in a strange land’ line?”
Maddox’s poems invoke historical and literary figures like Ben Franklin, Lucille Clifton, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, and not least of all, Robert Frost, including more than one reference to his famous “Mending Wall.” “Good neighbors make good partners,” Maddox says in one piece, and “good neighbors” make “two yards of well- / mowed yearning,” she says in another.
In some ways, True, False, None of the Above also serves as a welcome sequel to her previous Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf and Stock, 2013), a collection that explores questions about raising a family in a dangerous and chaotic world. In this present volume, she cannot help but reflect again on daily news and personal tragedies. It may be tornadoes or black ice, as in “I-80 Proclaimed Safe by Weather.com” and “Watch vs. Warning.” It could be the falling of a tree branch near her daughter’s head or of the falling of the twin towers as drawn by her son:
Beneath one of the windows
he has written “Help!” in his careful seven-year-old script. “Yes,”
I nod to his eager eyes, but I am trying to answer that cry of anguish
in a month of school shootings and sex scandals. “Help,” I repeat
as I take his drawing to the refrigerator . . .
Amidst such horrors Maddox soothes with sometimes winsome humor. “The English Teacher Contemplates Suicide” includes an attempt at a final note. “Help! Pitiful but pithy enough / for any Plath-loving / parishioner.”
In the face of the unknown and unknowable, she remains hopeful. Maddox’s poems bite into the fruit of daily living and learning, searching out the beginnings of faith and knowledge and wasting nothing in the experience, even relishing those hard bits we are usually apt to spit out: “But isn’t the seed better / its tough, hard case / beneath the juice?”
True, False, None of the Above was an Illumination Book Award Bronze Medalist recipient in the Education category.
David J. Bauman has had poems recently published in 2 Bridges Review and Barely South Review. He’s the author of Moons, Roads, and Rivers (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and the forthcoming chapbook Angels & Adultery (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). He is a public library director in northeast Pennsylvania, where he also edits Word Fountain.