Mary Beth Hines reviews
The Half-Said Things
by Miriam O’Neal

The poems in Miriam O’Neal’s third collection, “The Half-Said Things,” achieve a masterful balance between clarity and ambiguity that make them a pleasure to read. In addition to her humor, sensuality, love of music, and observational skills, O’Neal’s intellect is always at work. While her subjects are largely domestic, O’Neal cracks each poem open through surprising leaps into philosophical, spiritual, and intellectual realms. Jung, Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, and Biblical characters make appearances as her narrators and speakers wrestle to make sense of parents, siblings, children, lovers, spouses, and perhaps most important, themselves.

The book is aptly titled.  The poems work to understand the half-said thing, to recall the half-remembered person, song, or silence. This thread begins with the first poem, “still life with knowledge,” when a child hears a mother singing:

 …a lullaby about losing love, and though
she hasn’t lost anything yet, she understands
what the words mean
and how it will feel.

From there, O’Neal takes us on a lyrical journey that shows us both.

Toward the end, in the title poem, appearing alongside others of loss and longing, the speaker and an unnamed “you” sit outside listening to the melancholy soundscape. The emotion is almost palpable as:

…Words fail. The shade slides
past us…

Shortly thereafter, in the closing poem, “Little Consecrations,” O’Neal takes us on one last ride, breathlessly conjuring bird-after-bird, naming each and their collective group, until one feels one has taken off alongside them:

A blessing
            a hermitage
                        a beatitude
                                                of bluebirds
                                                                        A sky

Miriam O’Neal is the author of We Start with What We’re Given (Kelsay Books, 2018) and The Body Dialogues (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020) which was nominated for a Massachusetts Art of the Book Award in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Solidago, and elsewhere.

Mary Beth Hines’s debut poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House, was published by Kelsay Books in November 2021. Her poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction appear in Crab Orchard Review, Tar River Poetry, The MacGuffin, Valparaiso, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Her short fiction was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. (www.marybethhines.com)