The Return from Calvary
by Mary Ann Samyn
paperback, 72 pages
2025
Reviews
On Mary Ann Samyn’s poetry:
And so it is against this backdrop that Mary Ann Samyn’s poems—pitched carefully between the divine and the disjunctive—distinguish themselves with a novel blend of sly, strained, scattered wit and a deep, contemporary meditative urge.
—Anton Vander Zee (AGNI Online, 2010)
On The Return from Calvary:
“I was given silence,” writes the poet Mary Ann Samyn, “so I could listen harder.” And what could be more generous, more precise in honoring the spirit of attention and quiet intensity that permeates her stunning new volume The Return from Calvary. In a series of lyrics lamenting the passing of her father, Samyn refuses special effects and ostentations of style in favor of the more authenticating priorities of concision, movement, surprise, wisdom, and a complexity of feeling and idea. Though disciplined by the genuine and local, the daily and small, these poems stand no less at the threshold of the unsaid. Therein lies their gift. In heartbreak, wonder. In the futureless future, this calling to attend. A magnificent book.
—Bruce Bond, author of The Dove of the Morning News
About the Author
Mary Ann Samyn has published six books of poetry, including Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance and My Life in Heaven. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Colorado Review, FIELD, Laurel Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University and can be found on Substack where she writes Cake & Poetry (https://maryannsamyn.substack.com). She lives in West Virginia and in her home state of Michigan.
