Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue by Magdalena Hirt

In Maggie Hirt‘s second gathering of seafaring poems Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue, the narrator “wake[s] dreaming of poets halfway to somewhere in their lives reading poetry in a green space…” Hirt’s space is sky and water in endless motion, her family of five rounding the planet ocean-by-ocean, guided by moon and stars, powered by wind and waves. I love these poems, at once intimate and small as the confines of Selkie and the hungers of children, and vast and awesome as the depths of oceans beneath and the cosmic constellations overhead.

–Joel Lipman, Emeritus

“Can you feel the ocean breathe on your / body?” asks Maggie Hirt in Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue. Reading this collection, you can’t help but answer yes. Hirt’s poems explore how the speaker and her family chart their own course, making a life at sea. While mapping this journey across the Atlantic (and beyond), the poems offer layers an atlas cannot – of the sea at night and the way a mother, a partner, a strong-spirit navigates the ocean’s beauties and dangers. These poems are a reminder of the most elemental of worlds – ocean, voyage, family – and a reminder that home is a place we create with others through wonder and bravery. Here, we find balance in motion, and even the “Squalls / are shepherds herding us towards home.”  

–Laura Donnelly, author of Midwest Gothic

In Maggie Hirt‘s tour de ocean, Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue, we live aboard the sailing vessel Selkie journeying through the vast openness, experiencing wave after wave of water and daily life with her husband and gaggle of children, each, as children do, needing and are determined not to need “Mom.”  In “Not Tonight,” Hirt writes “What does the ocean have in mind for us?/Strange lack of control—a genie in a bottle—a climber/without a rope. Will I see reason or feel joy? Not tonight.” Maggie Hirt is a poet whose artistry takes us into what it feels like when a wave all but capsizes everything, what a mother feels seeing her children discover wonders far below the ocean’s surface, feels when mothering a sick child far from medical aid and at sea literally and metaphorically during a pandemic. To compose with the ability to use self not to draw attention, but self as that mysterious center where experience arrives, takes intelligent sensitivity and artistic integrity. In Hirt’s varied poems you will know what it means, what it feels like, to live far from the sight of what we reliably rest our feet on. And you will see what we now seldom see—the night sky. Life away from all reliability except for what’s aboard brings mother and wife Maggie to imagine writing “the note I’ll leave in the cockpit./Don’t worry, it will say. The Caribbean/Sea knows what to do with me, it told/me so.” And then to realize that “we have sacrificed/time and togetherness to be even/closer together, to remain madly in love.”

–Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, named by ForeWord Reviews/Indie Press Poetry Book of the Year