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March Book
March Book is a wonder and a revelation. A shockingly assured first collection from young poet Jesse Ball, its elegant lines and penetrating voice present a poetic symphony instead of a simple succession of individual, barely-linked poems. Craftsmanship defines this collection; it is full of perfect line-breaks, tenderly selected words, and inventive pairings. Just as impressive is the breadth and ingenuity of its recurring themes, which crescendo as Ball leads us through his fantastic world, quietly opening doors.
In five separate sections we meet beekeepers and parsons, a young woman named Anna in a thin, linen dress and an old scribe transferring the eponymous March Book. We witness a Willy Loman-esque worker who "ran out in the noon street / shirt sleeves rolled, and hurried after / that which might have passed" only to be told that there's nothing between him and "the suddenness of age." While these images achingly inform us of our delicate place in the physical world, others remind us why we still yearn to awake in it every day and "make pillows with the down / of stolen geese," "build / rooms in terms of the hours of the day." Like a patient Virgil, insistent and confident, Ball escorts us through his mind, and we're lucky to follow.
In five separate sections we meet beekeepers and parsons, a young woman named Anna in a thin, linen dress and an old scribe transferring the eponymous March Book. We witness a Willy Loman-esque worker who "ran out in the noon street / shirt sleeves rolled, and hurried after / that which might have passed" only to be told that there's nothing between him and "the suddenness of age." While these images achingly inform us of our delicate place in the physical world, others remind us why we still yearn to awake in it every day and "make pillows with the down / of stolen geese," "build / rooms in terms of the hours of the day." Like a patient Virgil, insistent and confident, Ball escorts us through his mind, and we're lucky to follow.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 27, 2004
8 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
Jesse Ball
32 books916 followersJesse Ball (1978-) Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently, the novel How To Set a Fire and Why. His prizewinning works of absurdity have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. The recipient of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Heinz foundation, and others, he is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 2, 2024
Poems that feel timeless and melancholic, in a world that seems scarcely populated, sometimes strangely foggy, abstract even. Very ambitious and I see the links to his later novels in this first poetry bundle by Jesse Ball
We should all see differently, though of course
some do, some are made to do.
- After a Death
Ethereal, cerebral and uncanny: the early poems of Jesse Ball have a lot in common with his later novels. The world in this bundle feels desolate and timeless, undefined often.
Almost Nietzsche or Kahlil Gibran level aphorisms are mixed into observations on mortality and ageing and the efforts required to strive towards truth and love.
On a sentence level there is much to enjoy, even though in some of the longer poems I lost my way. This is partly due to Ball using narrative elements, with some poems feeling like short stories. Still I liked this bundle and enjoyed it, even though it feels like a bleak world being conjured when you dive into this book for too long at a time.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Quotes from poems that resonated with me:
You look around, shocked again
that your life continues to proceed
in fragments that couldn’t possibly
add up to anything. Whatever
you thought you saw, it’s gone now.
You must walk back along the avenues
as a fierce sun resumes the work
of morning, burning through fog
bit by bit, until there’s nothing between you
and the suddenness of age, nothing between
your life and the blued violence
of the burdened, calamitous sky.
- Above a Street
Inside the stove, he found
a passageway, leading to a set of stairs.
This caused him a great deal of worry
as well as elation and gladness of living.
He did not, however, venture
into the oven, but sent his little brother in
in his stead. This seemed at first
a good idea, but when the brother
had been gone three days, he began
to second-guess the wisdom
of his rash choice. He’d go in after him,
he decided. But the passage
had shrunk by then, and no normal-sized
person could fit through. Yes, that’s it,
I sent him in because, from a purely physical
standpoint, I myself could never have gone.
And besides, he mumbled to himself,
it’s probably nice in there.
- Inside the Stove
The failure of modernity, said the man in the black coat, is the failure of the machine to act morally. It never intended to. But we were deceived by its sober efficiency. We believed it would do both more and less than it ought to have done. Instead it has done less and more, and brought us to many horrible passes. I suppose we would have reached these awful heights ourselves in time. And yet we have come early, and the only books we know are the ones that we ourselves wrote. They will be no help to us, just as we ourselves can be no help to each other. If someone were to forgive me for the things I did in my youth, even that would be an affront. Those crimes are the only evidence that I have lived.
- A Speech
no progress can surpass what a single individual,
bent upon his own change, may do if left alone.
Thus history, the history of ages, is not the true history.
True history is simply the arc and span of your own life.
- A Digression
Who among us can name his home,
can speak without fear and stand
resolute outside the haze of his own life
when the mountains come,
disguised as horsemen, sending
their weight in waves before them
shuddering over the cold ground?
- The General
and I could not sit long for knowing
that if I went anywhere, it was
in fear of love, and if I did a thing
that was good, if I did a great thing,
it would be in the service, in the fear of love.
- Measures
We are near a truth, and daren’t speak.
- House of the Old Doctor
At the edge of an arabesque, a cloud pit,
a fog, the ship stopped. There was no more ocean, nothing further.
Our captain stood beneath this display, and we could see,
like us, he was confounded. To have come all this way,
to have arrived at the very doors of a paradise beyond
all hope of recollection, and to find that simply, that truly,
our failing is that our minds are not big enough to trap
the seething pattern of the actual, that there is no sense
simple enough for these, our pathetic uses of comprehension.
- Further Usages
What I am told I want
I do not want. This is how
one begins to be happy, by leading
a slow trail through the brazen
chorus of disbelief.
- A Tale
We may build a fire that
is so large that there is no standing about it, but
only standing in it, and we will watch it take
us, and we will watch it take all that we know,
and we will call this fire the happiest time of
our life, and it will be our life, but we will not
be living it. We will have lived it. We will look
back upon the living of it.
///
Being human means continue.
///
There is no safety. Everything
is visible, and everything is harmed, and
everything is waiting to be harmed again.
///
Is there a distance more profound than the
distance of oneself from one’s own observations,
when separated by time? To know
something truly, completely, and to be the
genesis of insight, and then later, days, weeks,
years later, to look upon that thought as on a
foreign city, where populations have borne
lives without number to which you were never
party, though perhaps you knew their father’s
father, or his father’s father before him. The
blood has grown thin, and the streets are quite
unrecognizable. The myriad paths of our feet
and our body through life, drawn out on a map,
some small infinity of repeated passage, is as
nothing to the courses of the mind, which
moves as even Mercury cannot, bridging
impossibilities with assertions of the possible
born of misunderstandings that in time become
truth. Poetry may list, may render records in
this archive of my mind’s long tale.
I am a machinist, and
I build theatres, and in those theatres I say the
most foolish things I can think of. I do not, of
course, think at the time that these things are
foolish. At the time I am in love with the
substance of my thought. It seems to me, in this
haze, that every inch of existence is carpeted
in a rich substance. To touch anything is
divine, et cetera, et cetera. And then I am
ashamed to have said so to a full house.
But this shame can be borne, and it is a bright
and pleasing existence, building chutes and
passages for thought.
- Several Replies in a Numbered Column
We should all see differently, though of course
some do, some are made to do.
- After a Death
Ethereal, cerebral and uncanny: the early poems of Jesse Ball have a lot in common with his later novels. The world in this bundle feels desolate and timeless, undefined often.
Almost Nietzsche or Kahlil Gibran level aphorisms are mixed into observations on mortality and ageing and the efforts required to strive towards truth and love.
On a sentence level there is much to enjoy, even though in some of the longer poems I lost my way. This is partly due to Ball using narrative elements, with some poems feeling like short stories. Still I liked this bundle and enjoyed it, even though it feels like a bleak world being conjured when you dive into this book for too long at a time.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Quotes from poems that resonated with me:
You look around, shocked again
that your life continues to proceed
in fragments that couldn’t possibly
add up to anything. Whatever
you thought you saw, it’s gone now.
You must walk back along the avenues
as a fierce sun resumes the work
of morning, burning through fog
bit by bit, until there’s nothing between you
and the suddenness of age, nothing between
your life and the blued violence
of the burdened, calamitous sky.
- Above a Street
Inside the stove, he found
a passageway, leading to a set of stairs.
This caused him a great deal of worry
as well as elation and gladness of living.
He did not, however, venture
into the oven, but sent his little brother in
in his stead. This seemed at first
a good idea, but when the brother
had been gone three days, he began
to second-guess the wisdom
of his rash choice. He’d go in after him,
he decided. But the passage
had shrunk by then, and no normal-sized
person could fit through. Yes, that’s it,
I sent him in because, from a purely physical
standpoint, I myself could never have gone.
And besides, he mumbled to himself,
it’s probably nice in there.
- Inside the Stove
The failure of modernity, said the man in the black coat, is the failure of the machine to act morally. It never intended to. But we were deceived by its sober efficiency. We believed it would do both more and less than it ought to have done. Instead it has done less and more, and brought us to many horrible passes. I suppose we would have reached these awful heights ourselves in time. And yet we have come early, and the only books we know are the ones that we ourselves wrote. They will be no help to us, just as we ourselves can be no help to each other. If someone were to forgive me for the things I did in my youth, even that would be an affront. Those crimes are the only evidence that I have lived.
- A Speech
no progress can surpass what a single individual,
bent upon his own change, may do if left alone.
Thus history, the history of ages, is not the true history.
True history is simply the arc and span of your own life.
- A Digression
Who among us can name his home,
can speak without fear and stand
resolute outside the haze of his own life
when the mountains come,
disguised as horsemen, sending
their weight in waves before them
shuddering over the cold ground?
- The General
and I could not sit long for knowing
that if I went anywhere, it was
in fear of love, and if I did a thing
that was good, if I did a great thing,
it would be in the service, in the fear of love.
- Measures
We are near a truth, and daren’t speak.
- House of the Old Doctor
At the edge of an arabesque, a cloud pit,
a fog, the ship stopped. There was no more ocean, nothing further.
Our captain stood beneath this display, and we could see,
like us, he was confounded. To have come all this way,
to have arrived at the very doors of a paradise beyond
all hope of recollection, and to find that simply, that truly,
our failing is that our minds are not big enough to trap
the seething pattern of the actual, that there is no sense
simple enough for these, our pathetic uses of comprehension.
- Further Usages
What I am told I want
I do not want. This is how
one begins to be happy, by leading
a slow trail through the brazen
chorus of disbelief.
- A Tale
We may build a fire that
is so large that there is no standing about it, but
only standing in it, and we will watch it take
us, and we will watch it take all that we know,
and we will call this fire the happiest time of
our life, and it will be our life, but we will not
be living it. We will have lived it. We will look
back upon the living of it.
///
Being human means continue.
///
There is no safety. Everything
is visible, and everything is harmed, and
everything is waiting to be harmed again.
///
Is there a distance more profound than the
distance of oneself from one’s own observations,
when separated by time? To know
something truly, completely, and to be the
genesis of insight, and then later, days, weeks,
years later, to look upon that thought as on a
foreign city, where populations have borne
lives without number to which you were never
party, though perhaps you knew their father’s
father, or his father’s father before him. The
blood has grown thin, and the streets are quite
unrecognizable. The myriad paths of our feet
and our body through life, drawn out on a map,
some small infinity of repeated passage, is as
nothing to the courses of the mind, which
moves as even Mercury cannot, bridging
impossibilities with assertions of the possible
born of misunderstandings that in time become
truth. Poetry may list, may render records in
this archive of my mind’s long tale.
I am a machinist, and
I build theatres, and in those theatres I say the
most foolish things I can think of. I do not, of
course, think at the time that these things are
foolish. At the time I am in love with the
substance of my thought. It seems to me, in this
haze, that every inch of existence is carpeted
in a rich substance. To touch anything is
divine, et cetera, et cetera. And then I am
ashamed to have said so to a full house.
But this shame can be borne, and it is a bright
and pleasing existence, building chutes and
passages for thought.
- Several Replies in a Numbered Column
October 1, 2011
I had trouble finishing this one. The influences (at least to my eye) of Simic and Borges had me thinking, throughout, Why not just read those guys? Ball can write, no question, but I just never sensed a center to this collection (which might be the point). It's a literary puzzle or game, one that I wasn't in the mood to play. However, cool cover art and the George Herbert quote sucked me in. But I'm shallow that way. Then again, maybe it's just me wanting to read something cheap and trashy.
September 24, 2019
I've been looking for this collection for quite a while and it wonderfully lived up to the hope I had for it. Ball's early poetry here is terrific, setting up some of the same issues he'd come to focus on over the course of his first several novels, and several whole poems leapt out at me as condensed versions of, well, a Jesse Ball story. It's not a perfect collection and on the whole I'm glad he's moved away (at least for now) from the form, but there are some real delights here.
February 3, 2020
Some of these poems! Perfecting the parable at such a young age. The fact that he wrote these at 24/25 is insane. A great collection and my proper introduction to the work of Ball. The Village on Horseback is up next.
May 17, 2017
even as a fan of Jesse Ball, i had not read his poetry. as the introduction points out, this work lands firmly in prose even while considered poetry. this was definitely ok with me. even if i don't know exactly that he's saying, i love how he says it! Ball's works makes me feel there is a voice for all our thoughts, no matter how distant, disjointed, or dreamlike.
May 30, 2018
I enjoy a good book of poetry and this collection did not let me down. It is accessible although at times quirky. I sometime, although not often, thought I was not being let in on something.
Read
September 27, 2025abandoned
October 9, 2009
i may change this to five stars. i'm not certain. there were a lot of poems in this book that i thought were amazing. there were a couple that i did not feel this way about, but they were mostly in the beginning. in fact, over the course of writing this, i have decided to change it. it starts slow. by the end it has everything good about jesse ball. do you know what is good about jesse ball? pretty much everything is.
April 1, 2016
Brilliant.
It's rare that a book this long and rich can keep me reading all the way to the end, (usually, it's the kind of thing I'd have to put away for a while) but this is just such a book. (It's even rarer that I like anyone or any thing created in 1978, so that is in and of itself a miracle.) How odd that despite how much this book moved me, it's hard to put my finger on what exactly it is "about." Maybe after some rereads (because I'm sure they'll be several.)
It's rare that a book this long and rich can keep me reading all the way to the end, (usually, it's the kind of thing I'd have to put away for a while) but this is just such a book. (It's even rarer that I like anyone or any thing created in 1978, so that is in and of itself a miracle.) How odd that despite how much this book moved me, it's hard to put my finger on what exactly it is "about." Maybe after some rereads (because I'm sure they'll be several.)
August 25, 2010
it isn't all grand.
but where there is grandness, it is overwhelming and makes up for the sluggish voids.
but where there is grandness, it is overwhelming and makes up for the sluggish voids.
June 14, 2014
7,5/10
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews