Lanterns in the Night Market
By Mary Morris
Texas Review Press | 2025 | 71 pages
In this travelogue of a book, the reader voyages with Mary Morris’s speaker as she embarks on an array of adventures. Many of the poems in Lanterns in the Night Market are set in Mexico, although they also chronicle time spent in Istanbul, Beirut, Marrakesh, Laos, Bangkok, and London. Some poems specifically mark the act of travel, with mention of baggage, hotel rooms, train stations, and borders. Yet there is a quality of capturing lightning in a bottle as the speaker tries to encapsulate the evanescence of being new to a place, enraptured by its qualities while tripping serendipitously into the understandings that can be wrought.
Throughout, the speaker observes with keen attention to detail, noting the minutiae that create a metonymic impression of a place. “Postcard, Marrakesh, 4 a.m.” offers just six lines to evoke the emptiness of the souk through wisps of sound, scent, and visuals that represent the hollowed feeling that lingers at day’s end. Later, in the titular poem “Lanterns in the Night Market,” the reader finds a baker opening “doors to his clay oven,” “Torches lit above rows / of pomegranates” and other prescient details: “A man drums, a woman sings. / Children dance until they sleep” while a nighthawk (as in other poems) returns “suturing the sky / with dreams.” The images converge like puzzle pieces fitting together to create a whole.
Morris’s descriptions are often rich, as in “Bangkok,” which begins with the lush lines:
Across from the flower market of marigolds—
shades of tangerine, honey, apricot.
Fragrant jasmine and lilies.
The reader follows to see burning joss paper, a banyan tree wrapped with a wide gold ribbon, a saffron-robed monk, a pregnant woman, and purple orchids. At its end, “A gospel of boys / chant prayers.” This poem, like many others, includes a portrait of place that immerses the reader in a perspective that doesn’t judge but is steeped in keen observation. In the poem “London,” the speaker offers couplets that capture the city’s range—a queen in Westminster Abbey, a waitress from Ukraine serving sushi, a milliner from Sierre Leone selling hats—as the modern and the ancient comingle:
World commerce conducts its business
from 17th century wooden edifices.
Lanterns in the Night Market is a book of deep observations, narrated by a traveler who glides through far-flung locales, taking in what is seen, reflecting back what is evoked. Displacement is marked through poems that map the distance from familiarity to difference, at times with a forlorn effect. Included is mention (through reference of poet Derek Walcott) in the poem “The West Indies” of:
Poems scribed on barbaric history
of slave trading, plagued throughout
the Caribbean. Giving form
and order to cruelty.
There is wonderful use of form with good variety and the reader is in capable poetic hands. The poem “Dinner with the Dictator” evokes Carolyn Forché’s iconic poem “The Colonel” in its title and use of disconnected body parts. “Love in the Time of Insurgency,” with its epigraph “In memory of civilians” and mention of “ghost limbs, fingers / point here, over there,” provides background that the places visited are hardly peaceful, at least historically, for those who live there. The poem “Border Patrol” is yet more freighted as the simple questions asked about motivation for crossing seem almost innocent now.
Angels also travel throughout the book, as in “Angel at the Station,” where a haloed figure “heavily winged / iridescent / … / keeps one eye open / the other closed / before disappearing.” The presence of angels (or ghosts) also seems to stand in for what cannot be known while traveling, the faith it takes to venture forth, and while the book’s motif urges staying in the present (observing, engaging), the unknown still hovers whenever there is a push (traveled literally and metaphorically) into new terrain.
“Would you like to come along? / Take my hand. The past is gone.” is the last couplet in the book’s opening poem “Invitation,” which sets a tone of immersion into the new. The poem “Bioluminescence,” where a figure joyfully swims off the coast of Turkey on her 80th birthday, “cresting her own / galaxies and constellations— / a Milky Way encircling her body / aglow…”, breaks through as a poem with full immersion in the new as this figure basks in the evanescent joy of a rare experience.
Use of the open-ended second person “you” can both invite and obscure. The distanced voice of the speaker makes it seem as if travel consumes the available energy and reporting back is the best form of homage. I longed to know who the “we” was traveling together and the narrative around their visits.
What one carries, what one leaves, what is taken in, what is left behind form a matrix of observation throughout the book. The poem “Nest” works with the tensions of containment (“a nest in my cell-rich womb”) that contrast with “I was a carrier, delivering. / Carrier, caravan.” How to inhabit a place—as a visitor who desires to be transported, to deeply understand—is central to the speaker’s endless quest. All the while, this question interweaves with awareness of the liminality of travel as when in the final poem, “Hotel Room,” the speaker returns to a readying state before again setting forth “counting the hours / before your departure.”
Elline Lipkin is a poet, nonfiction writer, and academic. Her most recent book, Girl in a Forest, was published by Trio House Press in fall of 2025 and is a finalist for the California Golden Poppy Award. A past mentor with AWP’s Writer to Writer program, she is active with WriteGirl in Los Angeles. Her Substack, The Proem, features poetry opportunities and chronicles recovery from the Eaton Fire. For two years, she served her community as poet laureate and editor of the Altadena Poetry Review.
Header photo by Maik, courtesy Pixabay.
