In a literary market replete with mediocre inspirational verse, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul is a celebration of the best spiritual writing, both prose and poetry. Anyone seeking the saccharine will be sadly disappointed.
Judith Valente, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent and Pulitzer Prize finalist, currently a journalist for public television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and her husband, circuit court judge Charles Reynard, have combined their talents to render twenty modern poems by favorite authors along with a commentary for each poem.
The poems are arranged by themes drawn from Ignatian spirituality, including attentiveness, simplicity, loss and mystery, among others. Two poems address each of the ten themes and include such beloved authors as Stanley Kunitz, Lisel Mueller, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to name a few.
But it is the commentaries that give this book its special character. For example, Valente’s response to Hopkins’ “Kingfishers Catch Fire” offers a thoughtful analysis for the twenty-first century workaholic. She discusses not only her mother’s job in a Chicago pickle factory and her father’s manual labors, but also her own breakdown of sorts after seven years with The Washington Post, and her devastating layoff from The Wall Street Journal just after her nomination for the Pulitzer. She quotes Ignatius of Loyola and Teilhard de Chardin for advice on how to transcend the modern-day slavery of one’s job — easier said than done.
Valente’s stories can be lighthearted as well. One of my favorites is her tale of the Irish locksmith who helped her get into her apartment in London, where she was on assignment for The Wall Street Journal. When she offered him a cup of tea, he obligingly showed her how to make “a real cup of tea,” thus demonstrating Judith Moffett’s poetic lines, “The steeping in the dark; blind alchemy.”
A kind of dispassionate self-knowledge emerges in Reynard’s perspectives on the poem “Aimless Love” by Billy Collins. Reynard begins by discussing the theme of simplicity: “I have devoted a good portion of my life to the art of complication. My chosen profession is the law.” He recounts his years as a student, lawyer, politician, and state’s attorney, and describes with rare humility and candor the toll that his profession took on his first marriage, which ended after over three decades of struggle to balance career and marriage. He admits, “If one had accused me in a court of law of being an insufficiently attentive husband and self-centered man, I suspect the judge would have ruled, ‘guilty as charged.’” The current challenges of married life in the two-career family are even more complex, he asserts, and thus “our collective hunger for greater simplicity” is more relevant than ever. In this vein, his discussion of “The Hammock” by Li-Young Lee includes a touching quote from a birthday card given him by one of his two daughters, Rachel, at age eight or nine. She had written in crayon that she loved him so much her heart “oh most burst.”
Valente and Reynard not only draw on their own personal experiences in each essay and cite favorite lines from the poems , but also consult classic religious texts by Meister Eckhart, St. Therese of Lisieux, Brother Wayne Teasdale, C.S. Lewis, Rumi, and a host of others. In one essay, Reynard quotes Plato, John of the Cross, and Etheridge Knight in his jail cell, all on the same page. Valente’s tea story turns to Okakura Kakuzo’s classic, The Book of Tea, which refers to tea as “the cup of humanity.” The combination of personal insights, poetic analysis, and the great mystical and theological writings give the book laudable depth and allow the reader to play with ideas that mix the human with the divine in unusual ways.
This book will appeal to poetry lovers, traditional believers, and nontraditional seekers who reach for meaning amid the pressures and vicissitudes of modern life. Valente cites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ term “inscape” to refer to the sacredness that, according to Hopkins, lies at the core of all things. For readers looking for a tour of the “inscape,” Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul will prove to be a consummate guide.
reviewed by Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois
Judith Valente and Charles Reynard. Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2006. ISBN 0829418695.