What Lasts Recalls What’s Lost

The Next Time We Saw Paris
by Samuel Hazo
Wiseblood Books, 2020; 98 pp., $15.00

In preparing to collect my thoughts on Samuel Hazo’s newest book of poems, The Next Time We Saw Paris, I recalled Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Not a terribly hopeful verse to bear in mind when trying to come up with something to say. The philosopher-monk Thomas Merton has this take on it:

Now all our existence in this life is subject to change and recurrence…. life becomes secularized when it commits itself completely to the ‘cycles’ of what appears to be new, but is in fact the same thing over again. Secular life is a life of vain hopes imprisoned in the illusion of newness and change, an illusion which brings us constantly back to the same old point, the contemplation of our own nothingness. Secular life is a life frantically dedicated to escape, through novelty and variety, from the fear of death.* (Emphasis mine)

The proper response to this nihilistic merry-go-round? According to Merton:

The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves. On the contrary, it penetrates into that darkness and that nothingness, realizing that the mercy of God has transformed our nothingness into His temple and believing that in our darkness His light has hidden itself. Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery.*(Emphasis mine)

What does this distinction between the secular attitude, which denies and avoids death, and the sacred one, which embraces it, have to do with a book of contemporary poetry? I venture to claim that the sacred response to secular hopelessness, as Merton explains it, is precisely what an attentive reading of The Next Time We Saw Paris can give: an awareness that divine mystery abides at the heart of all things. In a world where all things pass and death is unavoidable (one need not look far), this awareness is an antidote to nihilism and despair.

If the connection between acceptance of death and awareness of divine mystery seems at first tenuous, consider this poem titled “Once,” which opens the collection:

If once means once, once twice

is impossible.

Once is quick

as a struck match.

But once

can be a song that keeps

singing after it’s sung.

Or a poem that’s once and always

at the same time.

To be complete

it has to end, but once

it’s over, it begins again.

This poem delights us because it both explains and enacts an instance of infinitude. Hazo takes a finite word that connotes a finite moment and carefully expands it: into a match, a song, and finally a poem that, though completed, has a life of eternal resonance. In so doing, Hazo reveals the mysterious multiplicity at the heart of our seemingly finite reality — a mystery of sacred provision that, like Christ feeding the multitude with fives loaves and two fishes, responds intimately to our fear of ending and lack: “once / it’s over, it begins again.” In short, Hazo redeems the fact that “all our existence in this life is subject to change and recurrence” by elevating reality’s “once-ness” to the level of mystery, rather than allowing it plummet to the level of despair.

Hazo is not merely playing with ideas here. The gift that allows his poems to resonate emotionally as well as intellectually is his attentiveness to the musicality of language — in particular, to the nuances of syntax, which he controls with exquisite pacing and unexpected off-rhymes and repetitions. A poem about two lovers begins: “Each one is the other’s only,” and goes on to satisfy our anticipation with a pleasing repetition of the word “other.” It goes: “Each one is the other’s only / other, and so they mate / without impatience or pretension.” In another poem Hazo remarks, wisely and musically, that for lovers, “One plus one / is never more than one.” While the collection contains occasional instances of clichéd language (“Kisses are their secret language”) and formal dullness (rhyming “late” with “hate” and “fate”), these moments are few, and forgivable in light of the rest.

On the whole, Hazo’s playful and witty syntax allows him to extrapolate the mystery of divine provision from the most mundane experiences. In “Mapledom,” maple trees, whose branches “beckon like the arms / of ballerinas,” provide a paradisiacal glimpse of a totally self-sustaining world within our own:

Although they’ve sieved

the wind through fifty years

of war after war where millions

died for nothing, they tell

no time except their own.

Here in the land of Oz where

total extinction is likely,

the maples offer no defense

but nonchalant irrelevance.

In “Night in the Eye of the Sun,” the eucharist becomes the imagined summit of a meal shared between two lovers in La Napoule: “The buttered crust / of our baguette tastes almost / like the eucharist.” This beautiful revelation is inextricable from the poem’s ending, which is the poet’s reckoning with the inevitable passage of time:

Our private

table feels so much like home

that we forget the time.

It’s midnight now in La Napoule.

Hazo’s range of material — and therefore the range of places in which he discovers mystery — is immense. In this collection, he touches on a bit of everything: relationships (between men and women, lovers, family members, friends), historical, literary, and artistic figures (such as James Joyce and painters like Picasso and Klimt), the state of the nation (as in “The United Status of America”), and personal experiences (he recounts listening “to a nine-year-old / Dutch girl singing Puccini / on stage alone as flawlessly / as Callas or Netrebko.”).

Despite this variety, Hazo’s voice is consistent, giving the impression that his poems are deeply grounded in a life of reflection. It is not the experiences alone which give meaning, for “there is nothing new under the sun.” It is Hazo’s awareness that there is mystery within experience (particularly discoverable through the music of poetry) which enlivens and grounds. One has the sense that, for Hazo, a life of attentiveness to the beauty and nuance of language has paved the way for a deeper attentiveness to reality itself.

There are moments in the collection when one witnesses especially moving examples of this attentiveness, as well as the joy it reaps. Consider the ending of the poem “Gifted At Christmas,” wherein the recollection of a child’s smile from earlier in the day comforts the poet with unexpected joy:

At home alone

in the dark, I trip on a rug

below a portrait of my wife.

I blame and damn the rug…

Suddenly a child’s smile

brightens everything around me.

I wonder how she found me.

The memory of the child’s smile acts as an instance of grace, an unexpected and unmerited provision within the moment’s bleakness. In describing himself as being “found” by this grace, Hazo inhabits Merton’s sacred attitude, wherein “the mercy of God [transforms] our nothingness into His temple.” The Christ child hallowing a humble stable; a child’s smile brightening the darkness of a room. The individual’s role (and by extension the poem’s role) is to receive, in humility and awe, this divine gift.

Certainly, the capacity to reflect upon mystery is a virtue shared by many, if not all, good poets. Nonetheless, it is Hazo’s ability to draw mystery out of that which is not merely mundane, but ephemeral, that most impresses and moves me. Hazo’s own phrase, “What lasts recalls what’s lost,” could be applied to this particular virtue. For anyone who (like this writer) flits from one ephemeral distraction to another, The Next Time We Saw Paris is a grounding collection.

Hazo’s poems are also reassuring evidence that wisdom and delight are not enemies, but rather twin leaves off the same vine, the one balancing and beautifying the other. In fact, the struggle to “come up with something to say” (the reviewer’s original difficulty; is it just the desire to impress?) is perhaps in some sense a secular struggle: the search for satisfaction in the ephemeral expressing itself as a desire to dazzle linguistically — as though the verbally impressive could mean anything without wisdom as its foundation. Surely, words may discover and convey, but not replace, the infinite mystery that abides within and beyond experience. Hazo’s collection is a beautiful reminder of poetry’s place in this co-creation and revelation.

*Quotations taken from Merton’s The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation