Marcella Durand, The Temple of Happiness

 

1. The World Is Composed

Here is a siphon that may be made in a cut
in such a way that there is a little tower
in its middle, and in the middle of that tower,
a tube reaches to the bottom of the cup. The tube
must be as long as the cup is deep. And in the
tower there must be three cross-channels against
the bottom of the cup so that the wine in the cup
may go into the tube. Above the tower, there
should be a bird with its beak held so low
that it may drink when the cup is full. The
wine will then flow through the tube and the
foot of the cup, which is double. The bird
should obviously be hollow too. How
to make a saw operate itself; how to
make a crossbow that never misses.
How to make the most powerful engines
for lifting weights. How to make an angel
keep pointing their finger at the sun. How
to make a wheel turn of its own accord.
How a drum handles the tension between
skin & air. Unlike voices,
which sing under skin. (“The World Is Composed of Continuous Objects with Various Shapes That Can Obscure One Another”)

The latest from American poet, translator and editor Marcella Durand is The Temple of Happiness (Beacon NY: Black Square Editions, 2026), following titles such as Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem, 2008), Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021) and A Winter Triangle (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. The Temple of Happiness is a lyric of little monologues, performed with staccato pulse of lines that bounce across gesture, motion and the absurd. “Take a ride on a questionable horse / who demands feather slippers as though / it thinks it is an emu.” she writes, to begin the third poem, “with Various Shapes,” of the opening sequence, a section-title itself sectioned and staggered across a sequence of nine poem titles. “Imagine! To be / rendered into hand lotion and sold at fairs. / Or would that be an antiques show?” Or, two poems later, the poem “One Another,” as she begins: “I have so many questions. Each answer is another / dollar added to the bill.” Durand works her way through a lyric of inquiry and quick turns, playfully riffing off and through language and sound. “Evening song, or evensong,” the ninth poem in the opening sequence begins, “if this is evensong / is my song even? I’d prefer rough and wild, although / prefer is polite word for the winds I just experienced / along the river, impolite air! But no apologies from  you are necessary, rather, I should prostrate myself / before you begging respite from what I am bringing / upon myself and everyone who is an anyone, with / overthought brains and opposable thumbs and two legs / and everything that makes us human that will soon / be humanoid.”

The Temple of Happiness is composed across four section-clusters of short lyrics—“The World Is Composed of Continuous Objects with Various Shapes That Can Obscure One Another,” “The Light Factory,” “Circles for Wheelmakers” and “Blue/Would Have”—as well as the extended poem “Without Charisma,” a poem that extends across the final twenty-plus pages of the collection. What I’ve seen of Marcella Durand’s work shows an attention for line break and cadence, how words are assembled together and poems constructed. She begins poems with a word or a phrase or an idea and begins to riff, build, accumulate and propel across a narrative stagger, thread and pull. “in the book of my family, I find / the time of my birth,” she writes, to begin the poem “stones, people tell me,” “taken // or took, in book, here in flower, / there are other pages of peacocks // do not read behind my back or creep / up hidden by music, I somehow wrote // the poem is strange, or did I really / write on that day, that date?” I enjoy the way the narratives of her poems really do bounce around—at times, suggesting a play akin to the language poets, where narrative might unspool and accumulate as an arbitrary construct, yet Durand always provides an anchor or foundation—allowing the most unexpected of through-lines across an inquiry of well beyond sound or meaning but in how ideas, the stories we tell of ourselves, and even thought is constructed. Or, as the final sequence-section of the collection writes:

                  […] I pattern
it, discern what I think may
be bright mornings and
dark afternoons, it will
be this until through
the cold months of
going through more
boxes and through
and through, and I
will make it make
sense. I will pattern.