If you wanted to send Mary Ellen Redmond a love note you would be wise to time its arrival for midmorning. The other hours—the darker ones and the brighter ones—are already taken. In almost all of these, the speaker, or the subject, is lying down or trying to lie down, tormented by an almost imperceptible and sinister yoga between the word and the world. In her first poem “Dangerous Angel,” the speaker has a panic of nightmares. She’s grateful. The bad dreams wrought by the dangerous angel wake her “from this slumber of illusion.” In “Unlikely Valentine,” eleven moths “lay flat against my window pane.” Again, she is thankful: “Their delicate wings are shaped / like hearts, edged in a soft brown fringe.” In this poem, the moths represent the eleven hours on a clock face. The speaker is the twelfth hour: “they will not live the night, but now / they are lovely, unexpected, and so / still (not a single flutter from them).”
