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Review: God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee

Dappled Things

God’s Liar by Thom Satterlee
Slant Books, 2020; 176 pp.; $18.00

Review by Katy Carl

After such a strikingly brutal year, it feels only natural to be experiencing a thirst for perspective. Paradoxically, perspective can flower from the dirt that is the nightmare of history (whose demise has been much exaggerated). As this year’s litany of cancellations—due to ideology, epidemiology, or both—rolls on, readers may find echoes of the present day in this timely story. Through the eyes of fictional Anglican priest Theodore Wesson, Thom Satterlee details a richly imagined version of the time John Milton was nearly “cancelled” for opposing the English monarchy and then had to go into quarantine to avoid catching a potentially deadly illness (in 1665, that would have been bubonic plague). Milton’s flight to the countryside in search of refuge from the worst human society can deliver reveals that, from the worst the human heart can do, there may at times be nowhere to hide.

Satterlee’s achievement in God’s Liar is to dramatize the consequences of questions that, in themselves, are often reduced to abstract terms in philosophical theology. For Wesson, Milton, Toland, and the constellation of characters who surround and support their hiding places, these questions are live issues with concrete implications: can we fully believe and trust in God’s Providence, in the face of the sometimes devastating plot twists of each person’s life? If Providence somehow includes and accounts for all the ways nature and experience may harm us, all the ways we may bring harm to others through self-interest or thoughtlessness or mere lack of clear intention, all the ways we deceive ourselves and others both knowingly and not: what stringencies, what penances, must we then accept to limit the damage of which we are capable—and what mercies are still available to us?

For all its backdrop of monarchical intrigue, assassination attempts, intra-church politics, and Manzoni-reminiscent plague drama, Satterlee’s storytelling is at its best when it addresses itself to the interior worlds of characters responding to otherworldly realities. Broader context is rendered in brief glimpses rather than Balzacian disquisitions. Individual human motivation—love, shame, grief, ambition, fear, and the longing for transcendence—remains consistently in the foreground.

As a result, the novel wears its author’s learning with a praiseworthy lightness, a grace not always conspicuous in historical fictions. Facts about the political and religious landscape, as well as quotes from work by Milton and his real-life biographer Toland, blend seamlessly in, so that the reader learns effortlessly by immersion—a pleasure proper to good historical fiction, one that the liveliest nonfiction can at times strive in vain to offer. An impressive list for further reading sprawls through the acknowledgments, an authorly generosity both to researchers and to the curious.

The text is not free of occasional infelicity, mainly in the rendering of the sound of the seventeenth-century English that Milton so thoroughly commanded. In all fairness, to render imagined Miltonian English with perfection is a task to give vertigo to any talent. Where the effort succeeds, it delights; where it falls short, it distracts from another of the novel’s charms, the presentation of characters who seem less like visitors from the foreign country of the past and more like people you might bump elbows with at a parish potluck. Purists may find themselves wishing the implied translation of the past into modern idiom either a bit more or a bit less thorough; others may find the blend of deliberate archaisms and contemporary syntactical patterns just right; this may be a matter of personal taste.

In constructing his fictional argument, Satterlee plays with, even turns inside out for exploration, St. Augustine’s dictum that “God does not need my lie.” Satterlee makes Wesson into what James Wood in The Art of Fiction calls a “reliably unreliable” narrator, but in a twist on the tradition, a self-consciously unreliable one: Wesson believes he can knowingly practice dissimulation for the sake of deeper truth. This may tend to suggest an analogy to the act of fiction writing (insofar as a responsible fiction is, precisely, a complex “lie” or fabrication constructed, arguably, in such a way that it points to truths higher than itself). As the plot winds its way toward completion and the consequences of Wesson’s self-deception play themselves out, readers are invited to reflect on honesty’s insistent demands and the places where real refuge is alone to be found.

Katy Carl is the 2020 Wiseblood Books writer-in-residence and the editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine. Her nonfiction has appeared in the National Catholic Register, Evangelization & Culture, and St. Louis magazine, among others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2021.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews

Review: Motherland by Sally Thomas

Dappled Things

Motherland by Sally Thomas
Able Muse Press, 2020; 126 pp., $19.95

Review by Meredith McCann

Sally Thomas is one of my absolute favorites among all the poets we’ve published in Dappled Things. There’s something Philip Larkin-ish about the elegant yet easy flow of her verse, with its unsparing meditations on aging and its remembered English landscapes. Larkin, of course, was a grumpy agnostic librarian who famously regarded marriage and children as a death sentence, so perhaps that’s where the similarities end. Thomas’s new book is called Motherland, and maternal energy is its “ground of being.” The book’s foreword enumerates the possible meanings of the title: “Thomas’s own motherhood,” “Mother Nature,” “the maternal birthing of poems,” “English as Thomas’s mother tongue,” “Mother Church,” and “Mary as the Mother of God.”

It has been widely recognized that the past fifty years have seen an explosion of “the poetry of motherhood.” The Poetry Foundation’s website introduces a page of mother-themed poems with the rueful judgment: “Before the 1970s, very few realistic poems about motherhood were published.” After Sylvia Plath, poets rapidly began to make up for lost time, and in the words of Stephen Burt in his essay “The Poetics of Motherhood,” “It is no wonder, then, that if we look back on American poems since the 1970s, giving birth and caring for young children are salient topics, perhaps the topics (if we want to segregate poems by topic) that have prompted the most widespread stylistic invention, the greatest number of poems by the most poets that sound the least like the poems of the past.”

Sally Thomas takes her place effortlessly in this new tradition, although her poems are not deep in the thick of milk and sleep deprivation. Her voice has a cool, leisurely authority to it: she is the mother in middle age, past the intense confusion of babies and screaming toddlers. When she does look back on those days, every reader with children will feel the stab of recognition:

You too had a pram, and children. You walked
beneath windows.

You pushed your little loneliness up the road.

Time and mortality loom large in Thomas’s work. Here is one of my favorite poems from the book, quoted in whole:

“Deer Apples”

While you’re still wondering what happened to the spring,

In cool moonlight and the crickets’ whispering,

 

The season turns. No more bridal lace.

Purplish heat flushes the shifting face

 

Roadside dogwoods wear, this hurried day.

Back home, you’re chopping apples to put away

 

In the deep-freeze for the winter: soft, bruised
windfalls—

Deer apples, people say—the fruit stand sells

 

Six dollars for a twenty-odd-pound box,

To bait hunters’ stands. Worm-bitten Gala, Cox,

 

Granny Smith, some little ones whose name

You don’t know, all together breathe the same

 

Ripe smell, almost fermented. Now you cut

The grainy flesh right down to the chambered heart,

 

Rigid as cartilage, where the black seeds nest.

You fill ten Ziploc bags, but mound the best,

 

Least-bitten apples in a bowl. It used to be

That passing children ate them up immediately.

 

Who’ll eat them now, before they liquefy

Inside their loosening skins? A waste, you’d cry,

 

Except that in this moment they’re a feast

To look at, heaped together in the last

 

Off-kilter light—curvaceous, red, or gold

As pollen, wax-cheeked, radiantly cold.

This is the best sort of contemporary formal poetry: not just metrically correct, but lithe and conversational. The music of the poem builds and builds until the gong-like shimmer of the final two words. How is it that our lives begin speeding up, quietly at first, while we still believe we’ll be “twenty-something” forever, and then “the season turns”? What happened to the spring and the “bridal lace” of summer (which is both a wildflower and the memory of being a young newlywed)? How do children grow up so quickly? All this relentless change, even the apples with their “almost fermented” smell, threatening to liquefy. And yet, the defiant beauty of this still life of apples “red, or gold as pollen” will persist—that has always been an important function of poetry since ancient times. (Remember Horace and his boast of creating a “monument more enduring than bronze.”)

Crowning the book is a sequence of poems called Richeldis of Walsingham, which first appeared in this journal. Like Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, it is a series of poems linked to an ancient Catholic pilgrimage site. Hopkins name-dropped the shrine in one of his poems when he said “a starlight-wender of ours would say / The marvelous Milk was Walsingham Way”—that is, the medieval pilgrims used the Milky Way as a signpost to their destination. According to legend, the Virgin appeared to Richeldis in the year 1061 and told her to build a replica of her house at Nazareth. She tried and failed three times, only to awake one day and find that angels had built the house while she slept. The house and its holy well became known as “England’s Nazareth,” the most popular destination for pilgrims after Canterbury. Eventually the shrine was destroyed under Henry VIII.

Gary Waller, a literature professor who made a little secular pilgrimage to Walsingham in 2006, wrote about his experience and mentioned the literary impact of Walsingham’s destruction, which “uncannily haunted the Elizabethan age in poems and folk songs.” Rather like Philip Larkin in “Churchgoing,” Waller visited the holy site with mixed feelings of mockery and nostalgia, only to be unexpectedly moved. “As I stood up and left the Holy House, pausing to regret the dryness of the well—no ritual of sprinkling for me that day—I asked myself what so many pilgrims ask: Have we listened? Perhaps the Guardians of the shrine would have had me listening to a more orthodox lesson, but what I was hearing was: Have we nurtured in all of us, men and women, what Shakespeare’s Cymbeline terms the “woman’s part”? Not, I think, enough. Walsingham gently suggests, to this pilgrim at least, that doing so is where our salvation may most profoundly lie.” His trip strongly impressed on him (despite his unbelief) that Walsingham “is a place of devotion to the female religious experience—that is experience not just by, but of, the female.”

For Thomas, this female presence radiates through the shrine’s history. She creates a polyphony out of many different women’s voices: Richeldis looks back on her life; a nurse returns home from the First World War; a medieval innkeeper complains that she is run off her feet serving crowds of pilgrims. I’ve mentioned before that Thomas’s poetry is often haunted by an anxiety about time—flowing relentlessly towards death, or looking back as our memories recede further and further into the past. And time is constantly confronting us in the Richeldis poems as we zigzag between the present day and the past, visiting 1080, 1918, 1854, 1659, 1216, and returning to 1080 again. Modern vignettes are braided together with the historical poems:

Through green May softness every year, the people
come

Barefoot into town, calling each other Pilgrim

 

In the self-conscious way that people do

When their world’s ceased to believe.

The medieval-sounding opening is a wry misdirection: the pilgrims are modern; the scene moves to a hostel where “an American couple / Watch with mounting dismay as their two-year-old / Smears herself with red jelly and cream beneath the mild / Horrified gaze of more cardigan-armored ladies.” This gently mocking tone does not, however, cut the modern readers off from the past, as if we can no longer relate to it. In a poem dated 1401, an innkeeper shouts irritably to a pilgrim that she has run out of room:

God found Our Lord a bed. Ale, ale.

Let Him—God save us—find you,

By Our Lady, a clean straw bed without fleas.

Everyone is demanding something of her at once—someone wants beer, another lodging—and her exasperation links her sympathetically with the modern American couple and their wild, jelly-smeared toddler. Richeldis herself speaks in Thomas’s usual poetic voice, except in the last poem where her words are charged with Anglo-Saxon and the pre-Norman world of Beowulf and Caedmon:

High heaven harrowed a dew-fallow field,

Planted what pleased it. The first building blundered:

Square, Saxon-style. Wrong.

Bad in its bones, the treasure-ship sank.

Each day the doing mocked and unmade me.

Like those deer apples, her very English is doomed to ferment and become something unrecognizable to her. And yet her words aren’t completely forgotten, as Thomas has named each poem in the sequence with an Old English title: “wif,” “sceadu,” “halig dag,” “brimfugol.”

Perhaps I can end this review with the observation that Sally Thomas is a pro when it comes to endings. That “click” of a good final line closing like the door of an expensive car is half the pleasure of poetry for me, and I will leave you with an assortment:

The polished slab that keeps his bones in place.

My unmaking made this.

I’d dress up now and marry you again.

A recurrent longing for something else.

And always to the sea are hastening down.

Meredith McCann is a poet and reviewer as well as the poetry editor of Dappled Things magazine. Her work has appeared in Presence and Able Muse, among others.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews

Review: Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

Dappled Things

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Paraclete Press, 2020; 128 pp., $19.00

Review by Maryanne Hannan

With the Heroides, a series of imaginary letters written by legendary lovers in elegiac couplets, Ovid (43 BC–17/18 AD) claimed to have invented a new literary genre, the persona poem. While this claim can be debated, poets, since then, have frequently released themselves from the confines of their own ego minds in order to enter imaginatively the minds and hearts of real or fictional characters.

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor takes on the inner life of the acclaimed Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Despite her early death at age thirty-nine, she left behind a large literary legacy, two novels, thirty-two short stories, numerous reviews, essays, and bundles of correspondence, some of which has recently been made public. Fordham University professor, associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, and the author of four books about Flannery O’Connor, including the recent Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is ideally suited to the challenge of writing in the persona of this brilliant, complex, wickedly funny literary giant.

The book draws its title from Andalusia, the family’s so-named dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia to which Flannery withdrew in 1951 to live with her mother Regina for the last thirteen years of her life. Here she would write her oeuvre, while continuing to correspond with the literary world she was forced to leave behind when she developed lupus, the disease that had killed her father. Rather than limiting her work, as she had feared, living in relative isolation enriched and grounded her work, where she’d come as “the magnet pull home to this red clay, / like a stone saint who has wandered away” (“Flannery’s Pilgrimage”).

Hours in the title refers to the divine office, which gave form to Flannery’s days, in addition to the daily Mass she attended with her mother. O’Donnell weaves poems about Flannery’s deep spiritual yearning throughout, expanding on “Flannery’s Prayer:” “Oh Lord, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately.” Hours also refers to the book’s organization, according to the Catholic liturgy of the hours: Lauds for poems mostly concerned with Flannery’s early life, from the death of her father to Iowa; Terce for poems of converse with the outside world, from James Baldwin to Thomas Aquinas; Sext for poems exploring the centrality of her work; None for poems of Andalusia; Vespers for poems outside Andalusia, including actual journeys, her trip to Lourdes, and imagined, the Camino; and finally, Compline for end poems, threshold poems.

Each of the one hundred sonnets written from Flannery’s point of view opens with an epigram, chosen primarily from one of her brash comments or insight-filled stories, letters and essays. They provide O’Donnell opportunity to explore problematic aspects of Flannery’s inner life, including race, amour, her fiction, family, and death, while preserving the characteristic sardonic humor, intellectual acuity, dedication, and self-scrutiny. Then, in cadences and language that Flannery might have used, O’Donnell’s sonnets unpack, react, or expand on the quote. For instance, “Flannery’s Existential Thoughts while Porch-Sitting” expands on her observation that she and her mother might both have named a dog Spot; her mother, “without irony,” herself “with irony.” O’Donnell uses this wry comment as an entry point into Flannery’s complicated relationship with her mother: “I almost envy her her darkness— / or should I say her light.”

The poems are loosely chronological. Important issues are addressed more than once, circling around and building based on earlier references. A notable example is the sequence of poems referencing her failed love relationship with Erik Langkjaer. The epigram for that series, “Flannery in Love,” is a quote from Erik, noting that kissing Flannery was like “kissing a skeleton.” Despite the revenge she exacted, “So I became Hulga, made him Manley, / the saddest story that I ever told” (“Flannery in Love, Take III”), she ultimately admits the value of the experience in “Flannery in Love, Take IV:” “When you left / I was myself again, lonely, odd . . . Even so. I treasure those long rides, / the thrill of your kiss on a red hillside.”

During her time at the Iowa workshop and time subsequently spent with the Fitzgeralds, she developed important contacts in the literary world, which she was able to maintain and increase through correspondence and the occasional visit. One correspondent in particular, Maryat Lee, elicited from Flannery troubling racist comments that O’Donnell develops in a couple of poems. Of her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia, Flannery admits: “Where I live we kill our prophets, / beat and butcher them, hang them from the trees. / Queer or Catholic, Negro or Jew” (“Flannery and James”), concluding “I choose to tell the truth in quieter ways.”

O’Donnell gives space for Flannery to express how central her work was and even to offer some critical understanding: “Here Jesus comes to me in every comma. / I do my best to make straight the way / for his incarnation every day” (“Flannery’s Christmas”). In “Flannery’s Manifesto,” she declares: “But what else can I do but write what my crooked heart tells me to?” And, then: “But what else is making fiction for / if not to trouble folks . . . / make them question why they rise from their beds.” God is good; creation is good; and writing in service to these truths is definitely good.

Both parents appear frequently. Regina, as above: they are devoted to each other and their way of life, but so different. Flannery felt a greater likeness with her father, who died when she was fifteen. His early loss ushered in “Flannery’s Fear:” “When my father died I could not bear / the grief that fell on me like hard hard rain. / But that was nothing next to the fear— / full knowing my mother was mortal, too.” When she too was diagnosed with lupus, “when the Red Wolf / ate up my dreams” (“Flannery Country”), that identification deepened.

The concluding poem, outside the cycle of sonnets, “Poet’s Apology,” written in O’Donnell’s voice as a farewell to Flannery, admits to “brief trespasses on your private mind.” To delve deeply into another’s psyche and try to make plain what perhaps even the subject herself has not fully realized is risky, especially with our contemporary sensitivity to cultural appropriation, but neither Ovid (nor any author of persona poetry that I can think of) felt compelled to justify their “stealth / and nerve to steal your mind and heart.” Perhaps because so many of us assume personal Flannery ownership, we react proprietarily, but in accepting these sonnets as literary creations, authorial what-if musings, I was thoroughly engaged. Did I agree? Disagree? Ever thought of that before? And so forth.

With her thorough understanding of Flannery scholarship, her nuanced critical understanding of Flannery’s work, and her own widely recognized skill in the sonnet, O’Donnell brings intrigue and insight to an acknowledged fictionalization. It was as if I were given access to a previously unimagined three-way conversation between Flannery, Angela O’Donnell, and myself. As a decades-long Flannery fan, I relished these exhilarating forays into Flannery’s world.

Maryanne Hannan, a poet and former Latin teacher, is the author of poetry collections Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo and This Can’t Be Good, as well as a series of short books on classical literature.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews

Review: Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen

Dappled Things

Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir by Ron Hansen
Slant Books, 2020; 183 pp., $20.00

Review by Jeffrey Wald

One of the most enjoyable experiences for any reader is to be introduced to a writer and to find in that person a new friend—and then to turn that new friend loose to participate in the ongoing conversation in one’s own head. Such has been the experience I have had with two of my favorite writers, Ron Hansen and Walker Percy.

After a heavy dose of large Russian novels in my early twenties, Walker Percy was one of the first contemporary Catholic novelists I encountered. I remember picking up a used copy of The Moviegoer and being blown away by its Christian existentialism. I was a sophomore in college at the time, studying philosophy and literature. I was daily confronted with new ideas and ways of living I had never before encountered. I found Binx’s pilgrimage toward the transcendent apropos for my own inner search, and I soon ordered the rest of Percy’s corpus; Lost in the Cosmos remains a top-five all-time read.

Not long after, my professor introduced me to Ron Hansen. What, I thought, a Catholic novelist who is still alive and writing? This I had to encounter firsthand. So I picked up Atticus, and here I found another quest. But unlike Binx’s open-ended movement out of the malaise of postmodernity, Atticus Cody’s journey aimed to discover what happened to his lost drifter of a son. Whereas Binx may have been something of a “prodigal son” (with no father), Atticus was a true prodigal father, willing to descend to the depths of human misery to find and rescue his son.

Although Percy and Hansen are perhaps best known for their novels, they are also formidable essayists. Percy’s posthumously published Signposts in a Strange Land covers an impressive range of topics with both seriousness and humor, and Hansen’s first collection of essays on faith and fiction, A Stay Against Confusion, transcends its focus by means of a Catholic worldview at once particular and generous. Hansen’s second book of essays, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, was published by Slant in April. These twenty-two short essays and two interviews again have put my mind on Hansen, and by extension, on my old friend Walker Percy.

Like Percy’s essays, Hansen’s succinct gems can be read and enjoyed in two principal ways. First, they can be savored in their own right for the beauty of the prose, the clarity and precision of the writing, and Hansen’s ability to express the hints of transcendence that inhere in created objects. Hansen sees reality as sacramental. He is at his best when portraying the salvific narrative ever-present in God’s world. His titular essay “Hotly in Pursuit of the Real” details how this narrative began to unfold in his own life as it drew him toward writing from an early age:

Looking back on my childhood now, I find that church-going and religion were in good part the origin of my vocation as a writer, for along with Catholicism’s feast for the senses, its ethical concerns, its insistence on seeing God in all things and the high status it gave to scripture, drama and art, there was a connotation in Catholicism’s liturgies that story-telling mattered. Each Mass was a narrative steeped in meaning and metaphor, helping the faithful not only to remember the past but to make it present here and now and to bind ourselves into a sharing group so that, ideally, we could continue the public ministry of Jesus in our world.

For Hansen, the world is haunted by a Creator, steeped in deep meaning and discoverable truth. Like Percy, he perceives the strangeness of existence. But also like Percy, Hansen’s writing is all about illuminating the signs and symbols that surround us, and thereby seeking to come nearer to the One behind the signs. For example, read Hansen’s response to an interviewer’s question in “Fiction as Encounter:”

I once read that according to ghost hunters, when you go into a house you almost never see a ghost by looking straight at it, but you can often see it out of the corner of your eye. I think that’s what happens in fiction: If you address something straight, people either accept it or reject it. But if you approach it tangentially, then they absorb it and it becomes more theirs.

Hansen’s essays, like Percy’s, can also be read as insights and interpretative lenses into his own fiction. The two writers cover different ground: Percy is fascinated with existentialism, science, the American South, psychology, and language; Hansen with history, the American West, crime, Scripture, and Ignatius. Both writers bring these deep interests into their fiction. Their topical nonfiction provides insight not only into their source material but also into what they are trying to accomplish in their narrative art.

In the third section of his new collection, Hansen directly addresses his own writing. He specifically discusses writing four of his historical biographies: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Exiles, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, and The Kid. These essays are some of the most enjoyable in the entire book. In them, the reader comes face-to-face with Hansen’s fascination with outlaws, outcasts, assassins, and adulterers. Here, Hansen’s empathetic imagination shines. For instance, of Billy the Kid, Hansen writes:

Reading everything I could about the Kid, I only found myself liking him more and wishing he’d had a father or mentor—which he persistently sought—in order to show him the right path. The older men he did find and admire were all soon killed.

Hansen also provides insight into more recent figures. Although I’ve long intended to dive into Thomas Merton’s work, I have yet to do it. Previously, everything I knew about Merton was contained in Paul Elie’s wonderful joint biography of Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, and Percy (again!), The Life You Save May Be Your Own—until I read Hansen’s essay “Goodbye to All That.” The essay is part Merton biography and part analysis of Merton’s WWII novel, My Argument with the Gestapo. I had never before heard of Merton’s sole novel; now I want to read this book that Hansen describes as “an interior monologue about Tom’s conflicted hankering, vacillation, uncertainty, and the naysaying voices that seemed to be railing against him,” a book that was “essentially a journal of his wistful intention to find solitude, renounce the world, and give up everything, even his writing talent, for a God who was the Solus Tuus.” I’m sold. Now I just need to get a copy.

Another of my favorite essays is “Shakespeare & Me.” Owing to my denseness as a reader, I was completely unaware how much of Hansen’s fiction owes a deep debt to Shakespeare. Not only does Hansen pay tribute to Shakespeare for the general form of much of his fiction—i.e., biographical fiction, akin to Shakespeare’s biographical plays—but Hansen also illustrates the specific illusions to Shakespeare’s work in many of his novels. The screwball comedy Isn’t It Romantic? was directly inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream; A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion owes much to Macbeth; the extended ending of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford owes its form to Julius Caesar; Sallie Chisum quotes Shakespeare in her conversations with Billy in The Kid. Why the captivation by Shakespeare? Hansen is ever in pursuit of the enduring, the infinite, and the eternal. And by his own estimation, “what seems to be everlasting is Shakespeare.”

Finally, I simply love “Why the West?” This short essay, perhaps inspired in form by Percy’s “Questions They Never Asked Me,” is composed of a series of twenty-five questions on the West. Here are a few representative questions:

Why does Big Sky country lift my spirits?

Why is it that the British automobile manufacturer Rover named its high-end model a Range Rover? And why are GMC SUVS named after the Alaskan wilderness?

Why is it that the cigarette named after the Duke of Marlborough, an English lord, was famously advertised by a cowboy?

Why do movie characters on the run always head west?

Why do so many Americans feel their country is overpopulated when 96 percent is parkland and open range?

Here’s one more question to add to the mix: why do I like this little essay so much? Again, I can’t help but think of Percy’s wacky and wonderful questions in Lost in the Cosmos. And again I’m reminded of the power of good literature, of the connections between writers that one finds, of the literary friends that one makes along the way. If you haven’t yet made friends with Hansen, Hotly in Pursuit of the Real is a great place to make his acquaintance. If you’re old friends, what a perfect way to continue the conversation. And if you’re so inclined, perhaps you might invite Percy to join in as well.

Jeffrey Wald is a writer and attorney whose work has previously appeared in periodicals such as Dappled Things, Touchstone, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere.

Filed Under: Mary Queen of Angels 2020, Reviews

Review: Jane Greer, Love like a Conflagration: Poems 

Dappled Things

Jane Greer, Love like a Conflagration: Poems
Pittsburgh, PA:* Lambing Press, 2020, 88pp, $15.95

Review by Timothy Bartel

Love like a Conflagration is a confirmation of a vision forty years in the making. Jane Greer did a daring thing in the early 1980s when she started a literary review, Plains Poetry Journal, dedicated to formal verse. It must have seemed, at that time, as if American poetry had abandoned formal poetry for good. Sylvia Plath’s confessional free verse was ascendant, and even American masters of mid-century formal verse like Robert Lowell and Gwendolyn Brooks had, in their later poetry of the 60s and 70s, embraced free verse to wide acclaim. And yet Greer said no to the strengthening zeitgeist. Her first collection, 1986’s Bathsheba on the Third Day, revealed a poet fiercely assured that the poetic concerns of the present, social, sexual, and religious, could be addressed in traditionally crafted formal verse. In the 90s, Greer’s vision fuelled Annie Finch’s anthology A Formal Feeling Comes, which gathered the best articulations and examples of the New Formalist movement. 

With this year’s Love like a Conflagration we see that Greer has more, and dare I say even better, to give us. Just like Bathsheba on the Third Day (which is included at the back of Love is a Conflagration), Greer’s new collection begins with a poem in loose, Sapphic stanzas. Most of Greer’s lines are Sapphic in their syllable count but not in their rhythm. In the first three lines of each stanza, Greer favors the more standard iambic pentameter with an extra unstressed eleventh syllable to Sappho’s Ionic lines with their strange and lovely central choriambic foot (an ancient four syllable foot in which the first and last syllables are stressed and the middle two are unstressed). But Greer retains Sappho’s choriambic rhythm in most of the fourth lines of each stanza. The poem begins as a meditation on glass figurines of angels, but moves to a consideration of true angelic irruption and divine love:

Love like a conflagration shall be yours now
love like an April river, like a tremblor;
love like an avalanche, a midnight bomb-blast,
finding you hidden, (4)

Greer shows off her talent for building energy through anaphora, and weaves spondees (“love like,” “bomb-blast”) into the iambic rhythm, until resolving into the more strictly Sapphic “finding you hidden.” Love here is not comfortable; it is akin to the justice and righteousness of the prophet Amos, all avalanche and rushing river. The final stanza of the poem contrasts this divine love with Christian kitsch art, to devastating effect:

This is your Precious Moment, I its angel,
angry and dark and terrible, God With Us,
Emmanu-el, come bearing yet more mercy,
but you won’t like it. (4)

In the first and last lines of this stanza especially, Greer fits phrases that could feel out of place in serious formal verse (“Precious Moment,” “but you won’t like it”) perfectly into her metrical structure, heightening the bitter irony of her tone. This is a quality that didn’t appear in her first collection, and it is impressive here.

Another very successful instance of this metrically formal usage of colloquial language is in “Unrequited,” in which the speaker addresses a dying Christ:

Love, and count it all as loss
You croak, shattered, from your cross.
This is what you call us to?
We’re just not that into you. (25)

A less confident poet would have used more conventionally poetic language for that final line, but Greer wants to smear our flippancy at divine love in our faces with the most banal of rom-com blather—which is nevertheless precisely metered to match and rhyme with the line before it.

Greer is unsparing in her acerbity against human willingness to devalue God and each other. In “Holy Thursday,” a foot washing service becomes a meditation on Christ’s identity with all humanity:

Christ the young brutes who bully my child,
Christ all those who really mean well
Christ the serial killers and senators
and everyone I’m sure will rot in Hell. (36)

Greer intentionally picks the people the speaker is most disposed to hate and insists that they, too, are loved and to be treated like Christ. The language becomes more blunt and even frantic as the poem draws to a close:

Christ the retard Christ the hippie
Christ the communist Christ the queer
Christ the many who live to annoy me
Christ my sorry face in the mirror. (37)

Greer allows the language to betray the speaker’s unfairness, condemning the speaker by revealing the speaker’s private use of slur words in condemnation of others. But in the final line, the speaker comes to the one person she perhaps is most disposed to find unlovable: herself. And she forces herself, and the reader, to see Christ there as well. Hopkins tells us that “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” Greer shows us what that can look like, in all its messiness.

One of the traditional forms that experienced a resurgence of interest due to the New Formalist movement is the sonnet. And there are a few sonnets in Love Like a Conflagration. Still, Greer’s most powerful shorter poems are often eight to twelve lines long, as if she doesn’t quite need fourteen lines to perform her dense and satisfying maneuvers. This is most evident in one particularly Dickinsonian poem, the eight-line “Saved,” about the passing of a fever:

. . . it listed a moment—left me startled,
with some subtle feelings, oddly bittersweet:
a sense of loss with no remembered having,
of cooling where I hadn’t noticed heat. (31)

Dickinson would have cut many of these lines in half, but Greer lets them stretch into pentameter and even hexameter in the first line. And she allows herself a Dickisonian double analogy in the final two lines, comparing her experience of illness to both loss and having, and cooling and heat. She wants us to not just understand her literal point through an analogy or two, but to meditate and even marvel at the two literal phenomena that form her analogies: loss and cooling are of interest in themselves, and she leaves us in her analogies, caught up in appropriate awe of them, like Dickinson before her.

Possibly, when the future literary histories of the last four decades are written, scholars will aver that the New Formalist movement was neither really new nor notable. After all, they will say, formal poetry hadn’t really gone anywhere: world class poets like Richard Wilbur and Geoffrey Hill were writing robust formal verse the whole time, they will say. And they will be right, in their way. But coming of age as a poet at the turn of the twenty-first century sure did feel, at least to me, like entering an age of free verse, and the work of Jane Greer and Annie Finch did feel countercultural and, perhaps ironically, freeing.

Though I would love to be proven wrong, I fear Love like a Conflagration will not win the Pulitzer for 2020. That prize will likely go, as usual, to a collection of topically relevant and formally vague poems that will be highly praised and quickly forgotten. Greer doesn’t write, I think, to win the lauds of those who love such collections. She writes for those with longer memories and deeper concerns. And in our age of bloated, lax collections clogging the Barnes and Noble shelves, each thin fold of finely crafted verse like Greer’s is a gift—a gift and a challenge.

Timothy E.G. Bartel lives in Houston and teaches writing at The College at Saint Constantine. His poems and essays have appeared in Christianity and Literature, Notes & Queries, and Saint Katherine Review. His recent books include Aflame But Unconsumed: Poems(Kelsay Press, 2019), and Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s Evangeline (Wipf and Stock, 2019).

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of Lambing Press as Seattle; Lambing Press is located in Pittsburgh. We sincerely regret the error.

Filed Under: Reviews, SS. Peter and Paul 2020

Book Review: Measuring Time & Other Stories

Dappled Things

Measuring Time & Other Stories by Nathaniel Lee Hansen
Wiseblood Books, 2019; 217 pp., $13.00

Review by Jeffrey Wald

As an attorney, I am constantly aware of the rules and duties surrounding conflicts-of-interest. Accordingly, I now feel an obligation to make this disclaimer: I have a conflict of interest in reviewing Nathaniel Lee Hansen’s first collection of short stories, Measuring Time & Other Stories. This conflict arose the moment I read the title of the first story, “450 Miles to Minot,” and immediately desired to like the collection. For Minot has immense importance in my own history. It is where both my parents grew up on farms in the fifties and sixties It is where I spent almost every holiday of my youth. It was the “big city,” two hours from my hometown, tiny Maddock, North Dakota, and about the only place I ate fast food, walked through a mall, or saw a movie at a theater growing up.

And so as I read on, I found myself cheering for Hannah, the young hero of “450 Miles to Minot,” as she escapes a claustrophobic college relationship in South Dakota. Hannah has been playing house, living with her boyfriend in an old farmhouse while taking eighteen college credits. What began as an exciting and romantic adventure has since grown stale and isolating. So Hannah makes a break for it. Where to? Minot, of course, the “Magic City,” where she used to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins every summer. And just as she formerly delighted in Minot’s fresh air after a stuffy train ride, so she now delights in the freedom of the road and the growing freedom of adulthood (cigarette smoke) mingled with enchanted childhood memories (strawberry soda):

She left the stereo off and rolled down the windows again. She enjoyed the wind whipping into the cab, the way it swirled together the smells of cigarette smoke, strawberry soda, and the vanilla pine-tree air freshener wrapped in plastic, save for its exposed top.

The denouement in “450 Miles to Minot” is understated, the primary action interior rather than exterior, shown and not told. But through this telling we come to see what Hannah sees: that freedom means more than simply doing what you want, more even than doing what your parents do not want. And thus the freedom Hannah experiences in her 450 miles of driving to Minot is a freedom away from the claustrophobia and regret of sin, and toward something good. In this case, toward the Magic City!

Having now read “450 Miles to Minot” and the rest of Hansen’s first collection of short stories, I can say that my desire to enjoy the stories has been satisfied. Part of my appreciation for these stories comes from their sense of place (and not just the place of Minot). Hansen grew up in the small town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, deep in the heart of flyover country, and these stories take place primarily in small towns in Minnesota or South Dakota. Hansen uses his intimate knowledge of rural Midwestern life to beautifully evoke the impression of these places, whether through a teenager running on a flat gravel road while “the broom grass shifted in the drainage ditch,” or by describing the scene after a young man crashes in a ditch: “A half-moon shone on the dashboard and revealed a field off to their left, the not-yet-plowed-corn creating a landscape as on another planet.”

While Hansen’s sense of place gives his stories a deep anchor, it is the people that occupy these places that give them their staying power. Take for instance “The Rez Fairy.” In the story, Alana is an inexperienced children’s counselor attempting to change lives on a South Dakota Native American reservation. But her idealism wanes beneath enormous stacks of bureaucratic paperwork and a massive caseload. On the day of the story’s action, Alana wants nothing more than to speedily finish her last two sessions and get home before dark. On the way to the reservation, she had counted three deer carcasses. (My own father taught shop class on a North Dakota reservation for years, commuting across 30 miles of gravel roads in an enormous 80’s Chevy nicknamed the “Deer Slayer” for running down six deer that barely left a dent in his steel behemoth.) Alana’s last two clients have characteristically run off, allowing her to leave early. On her way home, she comes across John, an elderly Native American, looking for a ride to the casino. Alana agrees to give the ride and then agrees to let John buy her dinner. These gestures appear uncharacteristic of Alana, yet reveal a deep desire: a desire for human connection, for closeness, to give and to receive. Her own young life is filled with professional disappointment and personal loneliness. In paying attention to John, she can perhaps kill two birds with one stone: feel as if she is doing some bit of good and assuage her loneliness. And then, in a moment of O’Connor-esque violence and grace, Alana receives a revelation. She sees one of her clients sitting with his family nearby, throwing a tantrum. She goes over to help, hoping her therapeutic calm will diffuse the situation. Instead, the boy throws a cup of orange soda and ice at Alana, drenching her. Again her ability to make a difference is thwarted. Her optimism is proven false. Does anything she do even matter? But then the second revelation and moment of grace: as Alana informs John she must leave, John offers her his hand. Instead of shaking it, she grabs it and wraps his arm around her and her wet sweater:

Even as its coldness pushed against her, surging more coldness through her limbs, there was the warmth of John’s body. She was trembling, but he held her steady. She thought, here was someone who knew what she was up against, and she knew what they were up against.

Alana’s moment of grace is not proof that she can change the world. She is not guaranteed any earthly success with her sad, broken, neglected clients. But for a brief moment, Alana experiences human connection. Empathy. She is the receiver, not the gift. And that itself is the gift.

Each of Hansen’s stories have these little moments of grace. Whether through a soccer mom finding meaning and purpose in baking cupcakes that end up saving the life of a diabetic old man (“Frost”), or a boy experiencing the thrill of runner’s high and the even greater thrill of a smiling wave from his crush (“Measuring Time”), or a young woman who gives aid and comfort to a teenage girl on the Amtrak who is drunk and vomiting (“On the Hi-Line”), and even through an insecure young professor sharing a moment of connection with an older colleague over (gasp!) a very uncultured Terry Redlin print (“Wildlife”). These moments lead to transcendence through the physical and temporal; in place and time and mediated through people. Theologically speaking, Hansen’s vision is extremely sacramental, where transcendence of the banal and ordinary is always achieved through the immanent—through the banal and ordinary.

Through these unassuming moments of grace, and the corresponding opening of reality that his characters experience, Hansen shows why he is worth reading. For he articulates the complex nature of all human life, even the simplest of lives. The hopes, dreams, loves, griefs, joys, worries, and conquests of his small-town characters are our own. For this reason, I hope this collection will find a large readership both from those of us living in flyover country, and from those in the planes above.

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.

Filed Under: Reviews, SS. Peter and Paul 2020

Book Review: Oblations

Dappled Things

Meredith Wise

Oblations
By Nick Ripatrazone
Gold Wake Press, 2011
92 pp.; $14.00
ISBN: 978-0982630969

“All things counter, original, spare, strange.” Oblations begins with an epigraph from “Pied Beauty,” the poem which gave Dappled Things its name. If I had to choose between adjectives, I would say that these Oblations are offerings of the spare. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Lent/Easter 2011, Reviews

Book Review: The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke

Dappled Things

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, 2019; 447 pp., $27.99

Review by Jeffrey Wald

According to a 1975 Minnesota Supreme Court case, the “whole purpose of the Juvenile Court Act is to rehabilitate a young person before he or she becomes a menace to society.” A noble goal indeed: certainly there are enough menaces to society lurking about; if we could but intervene and rehabilitate the young urchins before they become full-blown menaces, utopian dreams of progress might finally be realized! But then a hairy question emerges: to what are we rehabilitating these juvenile delinquents? Some prior, pre-aberrant period of life? Or an as-yet-unrealized existence? A state one must progress, or regress, to? To rehabilitate means “to restore to good health or useful life;” and restore in turn means “to bring back into an original condition.” So to rehabilitate is to go back to a prior state, as in, “I broke my ankle, and through strenuous daily rehabilitation, it was restored to good health.” The aim of rehabilitation, then, is to bring that which is harmed, or harmful, or both back to an original condition that consists of a “useful life.”

At the heart of James Lee Burke’s latest piece of fiction, The New Iberia Blues, the twenty-second in his series of Dave Robicheaux books, is a reflection on human nature that stands in stark contrast to the therapeutic rehabilitative goals embodied in the aforementioned Minnesota case. 

For Burke, or at least for his detective avatar Robicheaux, there can be no illusion that human nature, in its present configuration, is benign and innately trajected toward a useful life. Rather,  something deep down in man is just not quite right. Something inborn is off. The very wiring is on the fritz. Man, as he enters the world, is a menace to society. Not becoming one through ill-fated actions, but already existing in a state of menace that plods ever toward chaos, destruction, and annihilation. 

Burke has long been regarded as one of America’s greatest living crime writers, perhaps even as one of its greatest living fiction writers (The Denver Post called him “America’s Best Novelist”). But more recently he has garnered increased notice as an important living Catholic fiction writer. This is notable given that journalist Paul Elie asked just a few years ago in the New York Times, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?”, encouraging readers to “keep looking for literature of belief” and finding it “where you can.” Perhaps detective fiction has not traditionally been a reservoir of Catholic fiction (Chesterton, Sayers, and Greene notwithstanding), but those who seek shall find in Burke a uniquely American, twenty-first century, Catholic voice.

Like the plots of other Robicheaux books (and most crime novels), the plot of The New Iberia Blues centers around a series of murders within Detective Robicheaux’s jurisdiction of New Iberia, Louisiana. In this case, the murders are ritualistic, the first involving a young woman who was crucified and left to drift at sea. Evidence seems to point to the involvement of a group of Hollywood men, the mob, foreign money interests, and a few local street cops. So far, so boilerplate. What is unique about Burke is not necessarily his plots or even his evocation of the evil at work in the world, but rather his ability to portray where that evil comes from: in other words, to articulate something of the nature of evil. For Burke, evil is not simply a manifestation of a mental health condition, or isolated acts from isolated individuals, but is something akin to a living organism. He writes, “Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue.” 

And for Robicheaux, evil also is not simply something “out there.” It is continually at work in his own soul, a soul haunted by Vietnam, addiction, and prior questionable acts he committed as a cop. In the depth of the night, “when the booze and weed and pills aren’t working anymore,” Robicheaux understands that “real evil is not simply a product of environmental factors,” but a “worm that lives in the human unconscious.” Perhaps it is a “disembodied presence floating from place to place, seeking to drop its tentacles into whatever host it can find.”

Of course, what Robicheaux describes is a condition known by Christians as the state of original sin: a doctrine which, according to Chesterton, “is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Robicheaux is not only aware of the reality of this doctrine, reminding his daughter that “we pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago,” but also about the ultimate end of evil left unfettered: “I wondered if human nature and our susceptibility to evil would ever change, or if we would continue in our war against the earth until we dissolved all our landmass and our structures and ourselves and returned the planet to the watery blue orb it once was.” 

So is Robicheaux’s, and by extension Burke’s, vision ultimately one of doom, desolation, and despair? Not at all. For “where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.” And as with his Southern Catholic predecessors Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, Burke’s bleak realism is the very medium through which divine grace operates: not above the darkness, but in its very midst. 

This grace is present in various forms. It appears in a meal shared with his daughter (“I had almost forgotten how wonderful the life of family could be.”) It appears in relief from another dangerous bout with the desire to relapse into addiction:

I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.

It appears in beholding the natural world (the below quoted passage so characteristic of Burke’s writing):

I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mountain floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.

Finally, it appears in a mysterious light (perhaps the same light that blinded Paul?) and a large swell that rocks the boat holding Robicheaux, his kidnapped daughter, and the serial killer Wexler, throwing Wexler off balance. Resolution and rescue come to the protagonists in a moment of violence that makes Mary Grace’s thrown book in O’Connor’s “Revelation” seem tame by comparison.

At the end of Burke’s reflection on the nature of evil, what is one left to believe? Perhaps the Minnesota legislature is naïve, and the dream of returning villains to a prelapsarian state a mere fancy, but does this mean evil has the upper hand? Does original mean perpetual? Or does the light shine in the darkness, with the darkness incapable of overcoming it? 

For Robicheaux, clearly evil does not have the final word: “the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.” And as for light, Robicheaux “cannot watch the sun course through the heavens and settle into a molten ball without feeling a weakness in [his] heart, as though God does slay Himself with every leaf that flies.” So in the face of all insistence that God is dead, James Lee Burke continues to insist that it’s because God died and rose again that we have any life at all. And because of that (and his prose, and his narrative, and his moral vision), he is a Catholic novelist worth reading.

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.

Filed Under: Pentecost 2020, Reviews

Book Review: Reaching Forever: Poems by Philip C. Kolin

Dappled Things

Reaching Forever: Poems by Philip C. Kolin
Cascade Books, 2019; 128 pp., $17.00

Review by David Armand

Philip C. Kolin’s latest collection of poetry, Reaching Forever, takes the reader on a meditative, almost monastic, journey through a Dante-like spiral of earthly and heavenly places—a beach on the Gulf of Mexico during an unseasonable ice storm, an orphanage in 1950s Chicago, a homeless man’s “cardboard manger” in New York, a church in the country, a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro, where catadores search as “Buried relics molt and twist / into rosaries of green rind; thorny / knots and strangling vines wrap / around lampposts doused with darkness.” Yet it is so often, as Kolin reminds us, that it is in these places where one can “hear God’s breathing.” 

However, Kolin’s spiritually searching eye consistently goes beyond the obvious imagery and sense of moral didacticism that most readers might associate with this type of poetry. Instead, the poet takes his reader to darker settings, a contemporary Virgil guiding Dante through the circles of Hell and to places that likely would never appear in any watered-down biblical tract. For example, in “A Prisoner of Christ,” the poet takes the reader to a prison in Mississippi, where a monk

[…] was called to be a prisoner of Christ

in a different kind of hermitage

salving souls in cells at Parchman Penitentiary

teaching unschooled monks in striped habits

to sigh the name of Jesus. 

And it is this sort of seemingly paradoxical imagery (the idea that Kolin calls the “luminescent dark”) that is threaded throughout the entire collection, suggesting the necessary doubt one must confront before having a true communion with God and the divine. Or as Kolin later puts it, in “Autumnals,” “But uncertainty is also a catechism—”. And like the most sincere seekers, Kolin knows that “Only muddy water can scrub a soul clean.”

To further layer this idea with the type of complexity that a true communion with God requires, Kolin later questions, in “Magdalen Redux,” “But who keeps a garden in a tomb?”

seeming to ask if the earthly work we do, e.g., making poems, creating art, is ever worth the effort in a fallen world. Interestingly, he seems to answer this question in the affirmative, earlier on in the collection, in a poem called “Trees in Late Autumn” when he writes, “But whether they / blossom and bloom, / or stand mute in the cadaver cold, // […]. It’s all sacred forestry.”  These poems are sacred, we’re sacred, the world is sacred. Kolin seems to know this, to understand that God knows this, and that it is “through the long night, / God reveals his handwriting.” And if Kolin was ever uncertain of his own faith, these poems seem to suggest he has arrived at a place now—both as a poet and as one of God’s sacred creations—in which “reaching forever” is possible, that there is a place that exists where “you realize you do not / have to wear / your body anymore.” And it is through poetry, making beautiful things, i.e., “reaching,” that one might just be able to achieve this state.

The poems in Reaching Forever are further organized into sections which seem to track the movement of one’s potential ascent into Heaven (or “forever”), thus into knowing, awareness. It opens with a baptism (“Where Water Flows”); then slowly and meditatively descends (“Seasonals”), taking the reader through the darker realms (“Wolves”), only to be purified (“Sheep”), where one must “move uphill / toward the calling wind”; which then takes the reader to the penultimate section, “God’s Voices” and ultimately “Toward Forever,” wherein Kolin closes the collection with a poem that seems to allude to Frost’s “Directive”: 

Let your eyes write

new tears for a pilgrimage

to a place you cannot see.

But wait

for the thick darkness.

That is when he will call

for you. Till then

quiver your soul.

Don’t think about

being made in his image.

You will only be looking

into a dark mirror.

In addition to this satisfying structural movement of the collection, allowing it to read like a sort of faith journey, the poems in Reaching Forever are rife with evocative imagery that “makes a joyful noise, rising above / the morning of the dark river”, images that allow the poet (and the reader) to get at what Ezra Pound called the “luminous details” of life, or perhaps even more apropos here, what Hopkins referred to as “dappled things,” “[a]ll things counter, original, spare, strange;” here the reader encounters, for example, “louvered sunlight,” “hair like carpenter’s / shavings,” “wounded / pomegranates,” “rocks / coffined in sludge”, “an apertif of summer’s banquet, / stars and moon lilting across / fields, lawns, hillocks, knolls.” Indeed, Kolin’s is a world where “The moon grows / into a large crystal dial / telling sacred time,” a world where everything is most certainly sacred, but one “whose canvas / must be submerged / to be seen.” This again goes back to the idea of the necessity of descending before one can truly transcend, ascend, or “reach forever,” as the case may be. And Kolin submerges his reader as well, in a baptism of language, breaths of words and images, languorously inhaled and exhaled as one might breathe upon waking from a long, deep sleep. Kolin’s is a layered, nuanced voice, one crying in the wilderness to hopefully save us all, one lost lamb at a time “before the sheep gate / closes.”

David Armand is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also serves as associate editor for Louisiana Literature Press. In 2010, he won the George Garrett Fiction Prize for his first novel, The Pugilist’s Wife, and has since published two more novels, two poetry chapbooks, and a memoir. David has recently finished his fourth novel, The Lord’s Acre, and is currently working on a collection of essays. He has published reviews in New York Journal of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Lit Pub.

Filed Under: Pentecost 2020, Reviews

“Little Volcanoes”: An Interview with Amy Welborn

Dappled Things

I don’t know how it comes up or how we talk about it in a way that we both understand, but for some reason, I get it in my head that I want her to know something about me. I need to communicate this thing that explains me, that explains us, that explains our presence, how we ended up here out of all the places in the world that we could be tonight. I say what I think might be correct: Mi sposo, morto. She gasps, reaches a hand to touch mine, and I work out a way to tell her more about it.
I point to my heart.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays, Interviews, Pentecost 2012, Reviews

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Mary, Queen of Angels 2020

Purchase Featuring nonfiction from Joshua Hren, fiction from Jennifer Marie Donahue and Rob Davidson and the winners and honorees of the Bakhita Prize in Visual Arts.

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