Hanging On In There: An Essay in Meaning (Selected Poems)

Midway through her poignant “Office for a Dead Child,” Marie Noël makes a ready admission of the limitations of language in the pursuit of meaning: “The words come readily to mind, / The meaning though is hard to find.” Yet, for this seemingly ordinary French woman, words were of paramount importance. They were the receptacle in which could be safely stored the “meaning God entrusted to me, for whom, when or where, I have no idea. Someone will find it one day or another. Someone or no one, it doesn’t matter.” Hanging On In There finds that meaning, thanks to the resounding success of Pauline Matarasso’s translations. As Bishop Erik Varden notes in his Foreword, this achievement testifies to Matarasso’s “gift and austere discipline of poetry.” To the fifty-one poems in the volume, Matarasso has added an extensive, connatural introductory essay to Marie Noël and a section of her own commentary interwoven with Marie Noël’s prose. The result is an engrossing, unified composition that beholds the “cloudy underside of truth, which is meaning.” Read more