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Begin with a Question: Poems
Winner of the Illumination Book Award, the International Book Award, and the Catholic Media Book Award (3rd place poetry), Begin with a Question explores how the life of faith is a continuous voyage, launched anew each bright day of the spirit or dark night of the soul. This is a book of contemplation and motion, a journey—often in stops and starts—toward the Divine, a pilgrimage paved with prayer, praise, pause, penitence, and (of course) questions. Urgent and universal, joyful or joyless, tinged with doubt or rinsed with hope, here are honest queries that probe, lift, and lead to discovery. Begin with a Question keeps us moving, seeking, reaching, lifting us out of ourselves to something beyond. Using a variety of fixed forms and free verse, the poet examines our relationship to the one who asks, "Who do you say that I am?" A book for seekers, doubters, and believers alike, these poems bring us face to face with anguish, anger, awe, and adoration. They give us permission not to demand answers, but to follow the questions that lead to the Alpha and Omega, to the I AM that keeps us spiraling along this twisting path toward God.
Begin with a Question is published under Paraclete Press's Iron Pen imprint. In the book of Job, a suffering man pours out his anguish to his Maker. From the depths of his pain, he reveals a trust in God's goodness that is stronger than his despair, giving humanity some of the most beautiful and poetic verses of all time. Paraclete's Iron Pen imprint is inspired by this spirit of unvarnished honesty and tenacious hope.
Begin with a Question is published under Paraclete Press's Iron Pen imprint. In the book of Job, a suffering man pours out his anguish to his Maker. From the depths of his pain, he reveals a trust in God's goodness that is stronger than his despair, giving humanity some of the most beautiful and poetic verses of all time. Paraclete's Iron Pen imprint is inspired by this spirit of unvarnished honesty and tenacious hope.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published March 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 10, 2022
In my role as a substitute teacher, I’ve become accustomed to nagging students to answer their assigned questions using a complete sentence. “You can use part of the question in your answer!” I chirp, enthusiastically. So, instead of simply “Yellow,” they learn to answer, “George’s car is yellow.”
In her poems, Marjorie Maddox demonstrates her own unique ability to fold her questions into the answers she has received—and the ones she’s still waiting for. Begin with a Question is the trail of breadcrumbs she has left for her readers. It does not, however, lead to pat answers or tired clichés but, rather, to a welcoming pause in which, together, poet and reader take a hard look at some of life’s tougher questions.
Don’t be surprised if, as you hold your questions up to the True Light, they become prayers.
If we find grace to “walk out into [our] morning of Yes/and breathe what [we] need of silence,” we have lived a long way into reconciling the ever-present questions with the bright power of God’s yes.
May we have wisdom, in that moment, to kick off our sandals.
Many thanks to Paraclete Press for providing a copy of this book to facilitate my review, which is, of course, offered freely and with honesty.
In her poems, Marjorie Maddox demonstrates her own unique ability to fold her questions into the answers she has received—and the ones she’s still waiting for. Begin with a Question is the trail of breadcrumbs she has left for her readers. It does not, however, lead to pat answers or tired clichés but, rather, to a welcoming pause in which, together, poet and reader take a hard look at some of life’s tougher questions.
Don’t be surprised if, as you hold your questions up to the True Light, they become prayers.
If we find grace to “walk out into [our] morning of Yes/and breathe what [we] need of silence,” we have lived a long way into reconciling the ever-present questions with the bright power of God’s yes.
May we have wisdom, in that moment, to kick off our sandals.
Many thanks to Paraclete Press for providing a copy of this book to facilitate my review, which is, of course, offered freely and with honesty.
March 18, 2022
It has been many years since I first encountered Marjorie Maddox’s work, through her early deeply meaningful collection titled "Perpendicular As I". Since then, I have sought out her books, reviewed them when I could, savored them in private, and conversed about them with fellow poets and readers of poetry. So, I should not be amazed by the resonance in me as well as the objective expressiveness, that is, relevance, of "Begin with a Question".
Ah, how to describe this persuasive and substantive collection… Let’s see. To begin with, I love the line, “My heart takes off its sandals of maybe”, which appears early in the book, advising us that for every question there is not only a this-or-that response, but also the resounding answer, from the poet of faith, that can only be summed up by "yes": yes to embracing life in all its complexity, yes to its sorrows and joys, ironies and paradoxes, earthiness and heavenliness, most importantly, yes to a God-soaked, God-imbued, God-redeemed life. Maddox has a way of bringing opposites together, without forcing meaning, yet finding meaning—even in, or I should say especially in, the most mundane actions: a crochet chain, a backyard haircut, “suburban dirt and city gardens”....
There are also, more often than not, deeper territories to explore: painful, yet redeeming territories: a father’s heart transplant, a mother who knows she’s dying, who says to her daughter, “I am slowly fading away”, a poet-friend lost to cancer, their final visits. Through these and multiple other instances, the reader is given the clear impression that something very important, something vital, is happening all the time in the poet’s life and in our lives, in the earth around us, in nature, in society, in time—and in eternity. It is all consequential, whether below the surface or before our eyes, as we sense is occurring in these following lines. “Today, / a woman, not unlike me, / offered tea; the teen / the car in front of me / took on my toll; / the not-random angel / on the highway shifted / slightly to the right / a patch of ice / I did not see— / or was that me / become me / in them, finally folding / my fingers just so, the water / brimming, cool and clear / just as a stranger walks by?”
Perhaps in our do-this, do-that schedules, you may not take the time to pause and ask the questions Maddox asks, at least not consciously. But, here she is, the poet, asking them for us, nudging us to contemplate the answers, which always exists—hidden, tantalizing, frequently unknown, but no less real. The poems in "Begin with a Question" are as honest and open as the day, and as intriguing and haunting as the night. The people who inhabit the poems speak from their own places, yet enter into our space with as much ease as those fears and expectations, which abide in us. Interestingly, we are never left with disembodied questions, because Maddox has a particularly heightened gift: that of connecting intimately with the reader. You hear her voice in the poem; you sense her insistence, the joy when there is joy, the gravity when there is gravity—and often both. This ability to connect is almost uncanny; the hospitality of Maddox's poems translates into her asking the reader, generously, to return for a second and a third perusal. And you will be find it difficult to resist.
At the book’s closing, Maddox leaves us with the assurance that the questions are worth posing because the answer, no less impactful when it is yet to be discerned, involves ultimately a communion of saints, a communion of “mercy in perpetuity”, where we, all of us, sing “off-key, shrill, and wobbly”, but oh—by God, in God—ever so human.
Ah, how to describe this persuasive and substantive collection… Let’s see. To begin with, I love the line, “My heart takes off its sandals of maybe”, which appears early in the book, advising us that for every question there is not only a this-or-that response, but also the resounding answer, from the poet of faith, that can only be summed up by "yes": yes to embracing life in all its complexity, yes to its sorrows and joys, ironies and paradoxes, earthiness and heavenliness, most importantly, yes to a God-soaked, God-imbued, God-redeemed life. Maddox has a way of bringing opposites together, without forcing meaning, yet finding meaning—even in, or I should say especially in, the most mundane actions: a crochet chain, a backyard haircut, “suburban dirt and city gardens”....
There are also, more often than not, deeper territories to explore: painful, yet redeeming territories: a father’s heart transplant, a mother who knows she’s dying, who says to her daughter, “I am slowly fading away”, a poet-friend lost to cancer, their final visits. Through these and multiple other instances, the reader is given the clear impression that something very important, something vital, is happening all the time in the poet’s life and in our lives, in the earth around us, in nature, in society, in time—and in eternity. It is all consequential, whether below the surface or before our eyes, as we sense is occurring in these following lines. “Today, / a woman, not unlike me, / offered tea; the teen / the car in front of me / took on my toll; / the not-random angel / on the highway shifted / slightly to the right / a patch of ice / I did not see— / or was that me / become me / in them, finally folding / my fingers just so, the water / brimming, cool and clear / just as a stranger walks by?”
Perhaps in our do-this, do-that schedules, you may not take the time to pause and ask the questions Maddox asks, at least not consciously. But, here she is, the poet, asking them for us, nudging us to contemplate the answers, which always exists—hidden, tantalizing, frequently unknown, but no less real. The poems in "Begin with a Question" are as honest and open as the day, and as intriguing and haunting as the night. The people who inhabit the poems speak from their own places, yet enter into our space with as much ease as those fears and expectations, which abide in us. Interestingly, we are never left with disembodied questions, because Maddox has a particularly heightened gift: that of connecting intimately with the reader. You hear her voice in the poem; you sense her insistence, the joy when there is joy, the gravity when there is gravity—and often both. This ability to connect is almost uncanny; the hospitality of Maddox's poems translates into her asking the reader, generously, to return for a second and a third perusal. And you will be find it difficult to resist.
At the book’s closing, Maddox leaves us with the assurance that the questions are worth posing because the answer, no less impactful when it is yet to be discerned, involves ultimately a communion of saints, a communion of “mercy in perpetuity”, where we, all of us, sing “off-key, shrill, and wobbly”, but oh—by God, in God—ever so human.
March 27, 2022
I'm honored to be included as part of the launch team for this gentle collection of poems from Marjorie Maddox. It's beautifully composed and thoughtfully organized in a way that draws the reader into a space of sacred empathy.
Maddox is an expert in the craft as she explores the larger themes of beauty, lament, truth, joy, and ultimately...hope.
The book's title poem sets a theme that reverberates across many of the pages: begin. And "Start" calls to mind the words of St. Benedict, "Always we begin again." I delighted in the cleverness of poems like "Church Organist on the Other Side of the Wall." Other poems brought me to tears, especially the lament for Maddox's friend and fellow poet Anya Silver, whose poetry I also treasure.
A number of these poems have their seeds in current events and news headlines, as the poet explores how over the past two years we've all had to in some way begin again. Everything has changed: the way we gather, work, teach, learn, worship, shop, and travel. Even the way we relate to our closest loved ones has changed, and there's no better example of this than the poem "During my daily phone call to her assisted living facility, my mother explains that she is slowly fading away..." Maddox closes with "And All Shall Be Well," a lovely riff on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that concludes the book on a rising, hopeful note.
Start to finish, this is a heartfelt series of poems that is worth savoring again and again. When you arrive at the last page, you'll want to turn back to the first page and begin again.
Maddox is an expert in the craft as she explores the larger themes of beauty, lament, truth, joy, and ultimately...hope.
The book's title poem sets a theme that reverberates across many of the pages: begin. And "Start" calls to mind the words of St. Benedict, "Always we begin again." I delighted in the cleverness of poems like "Church Organist on the Other Side of the Wall." Other poems brought me to tears, especially the lament for Maddox's friend and fellow poet Anya Silver, whose poetry I also treasure.
A number of these poems have their seeds in current events and news headlines, as the poet explores how over the past two years we've all had to in some way begin again. Everything has changed: the way we gather, work, teach, learn, worship, shop, and travel. Even the way we relate to our closest loved ones has changed, and there's no better example of this than the poem "During my daily phone call to her assisted living facility, my mother explains that she is slowly fading away..." Maddox closes with "And All Shall Be Well," a lovely riff on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that concludes the book on a rising, hopeful note.
Start to finish, this is a heartfelt series of poems that is worth savoring again and again. When you arrive at the last page, you'll want to turn back to the first page and begin again.
April 19, 2022
What a curious, riveting book! Begin with a Question riffs on multiple themes with compassion, wit, and panache. Think jazz for the soul. There is “midnight music” here, “jazzy constellations of stars” resonating—especially amid the unthinkable. Poet Marjorie Maddox probes those enigmas, great and small. Endlessly inventive in her quest for understanding, she often stands words, images, or ideas right on their heads. Contradictions spill across line breaks, creating suspense. A fresh take. Solid reasoning underscores these poems, but the heart, too, has its say. I love the way Maddox communicates in multiple registers: storyteller, seeker or celebrant, puzzler or prophet. And like faith as well as improvisation, there are moments that tilt toward chaos until seemingly disparate notes coalesce. But pat answers? No. I’m entertaining new questions. Swaying a little. I identify with the Nigerian nun Maddox sits beside at a concert: “inside the long sleeves of her habit / her fingers, half-hidden / in the fabric’s heavy folds, / tap-tap, tap-tap.”
February 15, 2022
Marjorie Maddox’s new collection begins with a question and doesn’t offer platitudes or easy answers. But in poem after poem, her questions make us take a fresh look at our fallen world and look at it again with open hearts and eyes. Highly recommended!
July 16, 2022
For Catholic poetry fans and poetry fans writ large. (Hey, those who don't often read poetry—why not give this accessible yet smart, spiritual yet down-to-earth collection a try?)
I was provided a digital copy for review, and I'm glad I took the opportunity. These are poems that are good on the first read but get better over time and repetition.
In one of the collection's early poems (with a deceptively simple title—Maddox is amazing at titling!) “Picking Blueberries at the Convent,” the poet compares picking berries with praying the rosary—the simple act of sustenance becoming a sacred act of communion. It’s in these shifts (sometimes lightening-quick), which work like seeing through a caul to the other side, that is where grace can be found. That's what these poems do for me—locate grace where I didn't look for it. It’s found in our gardens, in the sounds of noisy neighbors through the walls, and, really, everywhere.
Why are we here? What does this life mean? What's next? Always, poets are asking. But by accessing the spiritual realm, often through the natural world and sometimes through humanly connection, Maddox is also answering our questions—without being didactic.
Or, if not always answering, asking for us. In “Without Ceasing,” she considers prayer: “all I can mutter is Why? How? / as if Love has a season…"
We seekers, we questioners are stronger together, in number. ("Wherever two or three are gathered...") In this way, Maddox feels like a guide, her collection a map to grace centered in searching—the act of looking a prayer, for the believer and the nonbeliever both, together.
These little windows onto the sacred provide nice touch-points or stepping stones in the collection filled with other life-outside-the-sacred-searching—even virtual life. Maddox's examination of the virtual gets at questions of human nature we're all still struggling with, post- (mostly) pandemic. What do we make of reality gone virtual or false—in the way of pandemic-era virtual tours, historic events viewed only on a screen, and halfhearted holidays without family? Even if there's no one concrete answer, we are better—more whole—for having asked.
Still, it’s the more religious poems that really work for me. I love to “hear God rattling / around in your shaky syllables”—anyone's syllables really, our faulty words, every one a prayer. Maybe I especially like “The Seven Sorrows,” with its feminine power and POV which makes Mary, the Mother of God, the subject who suffers in that all too human way we mothers can understand so well even in 2022. The divine and the banal. The sacred and profane. The real and the virtual. Maddox's poems guide us to the grace found in the space between, traversing—and perhaps closing—the distance.
I was provided a digital copy for review, and I'm glad I took the opportunity. These are poems that are good on the first read but get better over time and repetition.
In one of the collection's early poems (with a deceptively simple title—Maddox is amazing at titling!) “Picking Blueberries at the Convent,” the poet compares picking berries with praying the rosary—the simple act of sustenance becoming a sacred act of communion. It’s in these shifts (sometimes lightening-quick), which work like seeing through a caul to the other side, that is where grace can be found. That's what these poems do for me—locate grace where I didn't look for it. It’s found in our gardens, in the sounds of noisy neighbors through the walls, and, really, everywhere.
Why are we here? What does this life mean? What's next? Always, poets are asking. But by accessing the spiritual realm, often through the natural world and sometimes through humanly connection, Maddox is also answering our questions—without being didactic.
Or, if not always answering, asking for us. In “Without Ceasing,” she considers prayer: “all I can mutter is Why? How? / as if Love has a season…"
We seekers, we questioners are stronger together, in number. ("Wherever two or three are gathered...") In this way, Maddox feels like a guide, her collection a map to grace centered in searching—the act of looking a prayer, for the believer and the nonbeliever both, together.
These little windows onto the sacred provide nice touch-points or stepping stones in the collection filled with other life-outside-the-sacred-searching—even virtual life. Maddox's examination of the virtual gets at questions of human nature we're all still struggling with, post- (mostly) pandemic. What do we make of reality gone virtual or false—in the way of pandemic-era virtual tours, historic events viewed only on a screen, and halfhearted holidays without family? Even if there's no one concrete answer, we are better—more whole—for having asked.
Still, it’s the more religious poems that really work for me. I love to “hear God rattling / around in your shaky syllables”—anyone's syllables really, our faulty words, every one a prayer. Maybe I especially like “The Seven Sorrows,” with its feminine power and POV which makes Mary, the Mother of God, the subject who suffers in that all too human way we mothers can understand so well even in 2022. The divine and the banal. The sacred and profane. The real and the virtual. Maddox's poems guide us to the grace found in the space between, traversing—and perhaps closing—the distance.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews