Book Review

“What if there isn’t any way to touch?” Mary Ann Samyn asks in The Return from Calvary, her stunning collection about her father’s passing. The importance of touch—and of human contact more broadly—emerges immediately from the book’s cover, drawn from Herbert Gustave Schmalz’s painting of the same name. Samyn isolates a single gesture: Mary Magdalene’s hand resting on Mary’s arm as Mary mourns Christ’s death. This attention to small, precise details is especially apt for the collection, whose great strength lies in the way it invokes the everyday to capture loss. In the eponymous opening poem, “The Return from Calvary,” for instance, the speaker zooms in on the bars of the hospital bed, which “are for railing against.” In another poem, a passing train sharpens the speaker’s sense of alienation as it “runs along the other side of the river. This is not my town / though I’ve lived there all these years.” These poems evoke mundane moments and objects—such as walks through a neighborhood, a plane ride, lilies of the valley, and a hairbrush—to grapple with grief. With great precision and care, Samyn shows how such ordinary objects and scenes become charged with loss and the difficulty of maintaining a connection with those who are no longer with us.

One of Samyn’s great strengths is the way she draws on religious intertexts to narrate her father’s illness and death. The collection’s largest frame, as noted earlier, is the crucifixion of Christ and Mary’s mourning of her son—a narrative Samyn subtly reverses so that she, another Mary, grieves not a child but a father. Especially admirable is that her allusions never feel predetermined or heavy‑handed; instead, she threads them through the poems with a playful, deft touch. In “Abundant Life,” for example, the speaker recalls her father calling her “honey, tiger, Mary, Mary / quite contrary,” a line that folds together the children’s rhyme and the figure of Jesus’s mother. That doubleness returns in the poem’s final couplet: “That’s Jesus for you. Just super ordinary: / the way I liked to hold his hand.” In moments like these, Samyn shows how an ordinary gesture—the simple act of holding a hand—becomes a way of staying in contact with the dead, a small comfort in the face of loss.

Yet, there are other allusions and intertexts that also give The Return from Calvary its richness. One poem pays homage to Robert Hass, while another references Albert Camus in the opening lines: “Not quite the end, the main characters swim in the ocean. / It’s after dark. Fifty pages to go. A reprieve. / How did Camus know how to do that?” Here, the speaker turns to other narratives to learn about the pacing and processing of grief. In yet another poem, Samyn references the children’s book White Snow Bright Snow to navigate questions of faith and belief after one’s loved ones are gone. Through these references, Samyn creates rich histories and intertextual webs to grapple with ways to narrate the loss of her father and, in other poems, of her mother, as well. With a deft hand, she also interweaves references to Nancy Drew, Wallace Stevens, and Stevie Nicks into “I’d Like to Make an Announcement.” The speaker begins:

Nancy Drew, minus Nancy –, I look around.
Skies open and shut; I can’t read another thing.
No one warns you, I tell myself. Warns!
I mean. Geez. Then tears in the grocery store
because my mother will never again eat a meal she loves.

Drawing on Nancy Drew and the detective genre, Samyn reworks the idea of warning or foreshadowing to evoke not intrigue but grief. At the same time, the poem references the importance of reading and narrative in understanding grief and absence and the moment someone “will never again eat a meal she loves.” These lines are a wonderful example of the richness of this book, which seamlessly interweaves layered and multifaced allusions.

Grief and loss are hard to write about, but Samyn’s book is spectacular and capacious in the way it explores both. The collection is profound, playful, sorrowful, and delightful. Samyn is masterful in the way she captures contradictions and the complexity of human relationships, which one can glean through her engaging titles such as “You Never Know; You Always Do” and “I Wasn’t So Sure I Wanted It to End; I Wished It Was Over.” Samyn offers not only a meditation on loss but also a model for how poems can contain multiple contradictions without resolutions and how those contradictions make us human. The Return from Calvary is a nuanced and poignant testament to the enduring ties that bind the living to the dead and to our perpetual yearning for those connections.