Reviewed by Sandra Fees
Hover Here
by Marjorie Maddox
Broadstone Books
January 2026, 112 pages, ISBN-978-1-966677-32-1
In her newest poetry collection, Hover Here, Marjorie Maddox rejects the harried pace of modern life while never losing track of the urgency to move closer to what matters. What matters is relationship, and these poems invite us, even beseech us, to deepen our companionship with nature, ourselves, and each other. To do so means experiencing love alongside sorrow, remembering in order to forget, and embracing the shadows while noticing the flowers.
In addition to a prefatory poem, which is also the collection’s title poem, Hover Here includes three parts. These parts progress from a woman’s observations to her witnessing and, finally, to embodiment as she seeks to come to terms with the complex and paradoxical nature of life. This progression is subtle and organic, like the poems themselves. Across the collection, Maddox weaves themes of friendship, girlhood, ageing, and loss.
Part One seeks to make sense of what the speaker observes. Time spent with trees, lakes, birds, wildflowers, cats, and even a porcupine, offer glimpses of clarity, humor, and self-awareness. In “Praise Poem for the Ordinary,” Maddox draws our attention to
the pebble, the worm, the clothesline,
the warm bread, the simple turn of the head
that says, “I hear you,” the burr that lets go
on its own, the bluebird that returns to perch
where the dogwood’s blossoms glow.
The noticing in this poem seems deceptively simple. Yet, in later poems, noticing proves complicated. The speaker’s vision is neither physically nor metaphorically clear. Eye issues and near-sightedness limit her physical sight, but the ability to discern beneath the surface of things preoccupies the speaker. In the poem, “The View,” Maddox describes this desire to peer beyond what is known. She writes,
Always just beneath
what you can see, the viewclaims what you cannot:
shimmer and soar, quiver and flow.
For Maddox, what’s most wanted, most needed, and, also, most elusive is the ability to “shimmer and soar.” What’s most wanted are silence, stillness, courage, promise, and mercy. These are new ways of seeing, which, for the poet, are new ways of knowing both the world and herself.
In the poem, “Two Birds Mating on a Wire,” the speaker realizes she doesn’t know the names of the birds she encounters. She knows them only as “small birds.” Though small in size, they loom large in her unfolding awareness of herself. As she looks at them more closely, she sees herself more clearly. She sees her own drabness, winglessness, and lack of freedom. By comparison, the birds embody the wholeness she longs for. Maddox writes,
Small birds, pretend nothing
as you move close, away, loyal to wire until
the lure of sky causes you to know/name the thingsyou and I are not. Drab creatures of habit, wing-
less to land and leave so freely, we stare, compare all
to full-feathered companionship.
What would it mean to have a “full-feathered companionship?” This becomes a central question for Maddox. Part Two suggests one answer. Such a relationship would entail deepening and honoring our connection with the earth and other people. In this section, we find poems that are outward facing. They explore history, societal events, and the damage humans have caused.
The poem, “The Earth Remembers Seven Sorrows,” for example, is an evocative and haunting seven-part exploration not only of the earth’s sorrows but also of our responsibility to repair the world. This is the longest poem in the collection and one of only a few that exceeds a single page. It is also positioned just beyond the book’s midpoint, allowing it to serve as a kind of hinge between sorrow and hope and between destruction and healing.
War, fracking, glacial recession, wildfires, and other forms of destruction diminish the capacity for hope, leading Maddox to write that “hope is a small charred thing.” These word serve as the despairing contrast to Emily Dickinson’s well-known line, “hope is a thing with feathers.” Despite the tug toward despair, Hover Here remains faithful to the possibility of repair. Maddox reminds us that “the seasons keep changing” and advises us to “restore what can / still be restored.”
Part Three offers a compelling integration of the previous two parts. These poems interlink the speaker’s two seemingly disparate urges—the first, to commune with nature, the other, to heal what is broken. Here we find poems of embodiment that describe communal, ritual, and creative acts, including dance, music, karaoke, drumming, art, and grieving.
The poem, “Third Year: Three Friends, Three Deaths,” reveals the paradox that, when we mourn together, we move toward community and away from isolation. While each of us must bear our own grief, the pain of losing loved ones is also a human experience that brings us together. This poem’s use of the pantoum, a form which comes from Malaysia and is characterized by quatrains and repeated lines, creates an incantatory and hypnotic effect evocative of grief’s impact on the body.
The concluding poem, “Still Life of Milkweed or Bird,” one of my favorites in the collection, exemplifies connectedness. The poem is born of a collaboration between the poet and the artist, Karen Elias, whose photograph, “Flight,” appears on the book’s cover. There are several other ekphrastic poems in this section, including two others written in response to Elias’ photography. Other ekphrastic pieces respond to music and other art forms. In this one, what emerges is the
brittle surprise
of beauty,brown husk of a wing
tipped up, speckled
bird reminderof chirp, of everything
still willing
to soar.
Hover Here soars with vivid imagery, deftly crafted language. and memorable phrasing. To use Maddox’s own words from her poem, “Fly a Kite Day,” this collection is “a kaleidoscope of kites, high in the sky / and soaring.” And like kites, these lyrical poems linger in the imagination.
About the reviewer:Sandra Fees is the author of Wonderwork (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), herfirst full-length poetry collection. Her poems appear in Florida Review Online, Nimrod, The MacGuffin, Psaltery & Lyre, Little Patuxent and elsewhere, and have won awards from Iron Horse Literary Review and Sunspot Lit. She lives in southeastern Pennsylvania.