Poet Maggie Dietz of UMass Lowell

In her weekly Substack newsletter, ‘New England Literary News,’ writer Nina MacLaughlin shares her view of a new collection of poems by Maggie Dietz of the UMass Lowell Dept. of English. Readers can subscribe to New England Literary News here.

Here is the brief review:

In her searing new collection, If You Would Let Me (Four Way), poet Maggie Dietz breathes new heat into the story of Persephone and Demeter. Dietz, who teaches at UMass Lowell and lives in New Hampshire, writes of the tumult of adolescence, the moment when innocence begins its dissolve, secrets on a riverbank, picking hyacinths before the earth cracks. Then it’s hair dye and botched piercings of the face and a pick-up stick laddering of slice marks on the arm. There’s exile and outcastery and wilder violence, too, a smashed mirror, a hurled stone. Dietz captures a mother’s helplessness and the bone-deep need to help: if only the girl would let herself be held, “Your broken eyes would see how much you need me.” It’s the mother’s ungrantable wish, and a bashing fury results. “I let you I gave you I held / You I made you but I couldn’t / Save you.” And what can a mother do? Demeter “let small children starve and cows / with calves I am not proud but what choice did I have / like corn and barley they were mine to kill.” Remember: Demeter’s rage came from the simple question, where did my daughter go? Dietz reminds us, “It isn’t safe to love.”