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wild flight

“Upon Being Asked What I Believe In,” near the end of Christine Rhein’s Walt McDonald Prize winning Wild Flight, is a key to the whole collection. She begins with language: “I say, for starters, the word in, / the way it dumps quicksand before / love and trouble, or after belief / and jump right!” (90) This delight in the smallest of words and what they do in relation to others serves Rhein well – and it is the relation, the dumping of quicksand, more than the sound or the shape, that first captures her attention. The list that follows in this poem is full of ordinary words naming ordinary objects full of life. The poet describes, but she also invites readers into a world of wooden spoons “meandering through thick lentil soup / with basil” (90) – a world rich with “music from unexpected sources” (90). This is a working world best known by working, not watching, just what one would expect from a poet-engineer – but also a wonderfully distilled instance of poetry’s experimental possibilities. In Rhein’s hands (and she is always anxious to get them on the working of the world), the experimental possibilities of poetry have less to do with the poem’s form than with its action. She speaks of “the temple / of science and poetry” (91); but the temple is also a laboratory and a workshop. Poetry – itself a making – is about knowing and doing as well as feeling, one of the things that made it a serious rival, not simply a frivolous alternative, to philosophy, if we are to believe Plato’s dialogues.

The book begins with a series of recollections of the poet’s father that inform the whole. There is an interesting parallel between the insistence on “German suffering” articulated by a Jewish woman speaking to the poet’s reflection “In the Women’s Room” and a pervasive suburban angst that resonates through poems like “How to Tell It,” in which a childhood friend who stayed in the city when the poet’s family fled looks the poet up in the suburbs. As the friend drives away, the poet, waving from the porch, knows she won’t phone “as promised, our friendship frozen / like a cartwheel mid-turn, my lawn too vast, / too green, no sidewalks heaved up by roots” (37). While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for this poetic persona with a vast green lawn and no sidewalks. it seems the collection is in part a struggle to thaw such frozen relationships in close encounter with objects that are full of life. And that is where music enters, making poetry of a collection that begins dangerously close to chopped prose. The beginning is poignant, no doubt; but breaking it into lines does not make it sing.

Rhein’s words do sing, though, beginning with “During Plans for War, Crows”: “This flock, explicit ink / in a landscape of snow, // as if there were no buried layers, / grass and root, rock and bone” (19) and “Story Problems”: “Edvard Munch painted different versions of The Scream. / Plot the size of the howls against / the intensity of the blood-red sky” (21). Plotting sound’s size against the intensity of sky’s space stops us long enough to catch the rhythm as well as the problem posed in those three lines. And each verse of this poem takes an equally illuminating turn, as in this little homily on a pericope of Stalin: “Stalin said, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths / a statistic. Prove his theory using AIDS victims. / Solve for grief in Africa” (21). Is this nothing more than a trite criticism of Stalin’s atrocities? Does it raise the possibility that AIDS policies are equivalent to Stalin’s – thereby raising the question of who plays Stalin’s role? Does it simply cast Africa as victim and contain AIDS related suffering there? Does it call into question the act of “proving” a theory by using “victims” rather than encountering persons as persons? Perhaps all of the above. And, particularly, in the last possibility, we see some of the subtlety with which Rhein sets about thawing cartwheels in mid-turn.

Rhein uses words to experiment with ideas about objects in the world, but she also uses words as objects on which to experiment with vision – as in “Self-Portraits, Three-Way Mirror” (27). It is tempting to read this as two poems – one left-justified, one right – reflecting each other as they reflect two sides of the poet’s personality. The left is an engineer, the right a poet – dangerously close to a simple repetition of the stereotypical division of left and right brains in popular psychology. But the title directs us to self-portraits (plural) and a three-way mirror: the poetic persona is not simply reflected in a mirror, and the two sides do not simply reflect one another. If we encounter the persona at all, we do so in front of the mirror, reflected on three sides, turning the way a person standing before a mirror in a fitting room turns. Suddenly, the blank space spiraling down the center of the page appears. the closest thing we have to looking the poet in the eye.

And “In Code” (40, 41) is both visually arresting and conceptually explosive. It begins with an excerpt from The Detroit Free Press noting that “It was the complex software created at Michigan’s Gene Codes Corporation that made most of the 1,571 successful World Trade Center victim identifications possible” and that “the Gene Codes staff is working on Version 137 of the software called Mass-Fatality Identification System, M-FISys, pronounced emphasis.” One might just stop at M-FISys, staggered by the fact of 137 iterations of software designed for mass fatality identification – and counting. But Rhein writes a computer program down the left margin while she juxtaposes “tiny vials cradling / flecks of charred bone” with “parents, siblings, children / silently opening their mouths to offer / a swab of their cells, the tangible scrape / of something carried within” and “your four-year old son / building towers of LEGO, / knocking them over / with his Fisher-Price plane” (40). The program, running down the left margin, ends “Read Only / Object Stream / Description Hold // End If” – while the text running down the center (the way we might expect a poem to run) ends “hope packaged in manila envelopes, / in a lipstick or razor, toothbrush or / pillowcase a spouse folded / and smelled for the last time / or maybe the first” (41). The program on the left margin and the stanzas running down the center are staggered, so “Read Only” appears in the gap between the last two stanzas, while “End If” appears on the line after the last stanza ends. Reading left to right, line by line, there are no stanza breaks, though the gaps between the “program” and the “poem” make the two appear to be in separate columns. As if there were no buried layers.

“And the Beat Goes On” (67, 68) is a “found” pantoum that uses advertising slogans and phrases from popular songs (while evoking, at least for one generation of readers, visual and aural images of Sonny and Cher) to shed new light on “Another day in paradise.” It comes at the beginning of the fourth and final section of the collection, set in motion by a comment from Fran Lebowitz: “Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can’t close your ears…” (65) The poems in this section circulate around the world’s noise – but also its processes – our processes – of tuning, nightingales in London and Berlin that “now sing fourteen decibels louder / to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure // in their lungs” and a poet in the suburbs musing on silence while trying not to hear the “boom! boom! boom! / from the shooting range” two miles away.

So many ways, contra Lebowitz, to close our ears…

And this is a wonderful first collection by a poet intent on using some of them to open our eyes to unexpected music from unexpected sources, prodding us (the way engineers often do) to get our hands on the working of the world if we expect to know it.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Christine Rhein. Wild Flight. Texas Tech University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-89672-621-5.

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twenty poems to nourish your soul

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.

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famous last words

The title of Catherine Pierce’s 2007 Saturnalia Book Prize winning collection points to the final short section of the book – a series of seven poems, each of which begins with last words attributed to a famous person, from Billy the Kid to Pancho Villa. The final lines shed light on the whole: “How else / can we live forever? How else / can we write ourselves in?” (66) Pancho Villa’s associates – like the poet – “cannot help but imagine.”

The first section consists of eight “love poems” – to sinister moments, the word lonesome, a blank space, America, the phrase Let’s get coffee, DooWop, longing, and fear – that pretty thoroughly traverse the spiritual landscape of contemporary America (and do it in an oddly loving way). To America, the poet writes “teach me how to strut. // … You’re the one I want // to hate, with all your swagger and bravado, / and of course you take me home / every time. Who could resist?” (5) Oddly loving… “I love the asphalt taste of you, / your acid smell and your hunger and I love / how, afterward, you roll over and snore / like a locomotive before I even catch my breath.” There is a fire here that lights up landscapes of peculiarly self-destructive love: “In bed, / you fell me like a redwood. I am lost / in your factory body…” (5). Somehow it seems appropriate that this love poem to a peculiar country follows a love poem to a blank space and lies in the middle of a section that moves toward love poems to longing (“You’ve left me / wanting nothing”) and fear (“all bombast / and mystery. Everything / yours for the taking”) while it paves the way for the long road trip of section two.

The heart of the book is (adopting the title of one of the poems in the second section) a “cross-country song.” Pierce writes about places she has passed through as well as places she has lived with affection, but also with an eye that is not buying myths of innocence: “Oh country, you are an animal to yourself. / Let me roll in the dust alongside you.” (15) The object under observation is the observer as much as the observed: “Some days I watch myself / in the third person, speak to her / in the second. I say: I will / meet you in sleep. I will know you / by your stillness and your shaking.” (19) There are beautiful recollections of place here – “Fat Tuesday,” “Retrospect,” “Memphis” – but they are also recollections of time, as in “Adolescence”: “You dream yourself into every fairytale, the grisly / versions where the prince’s eyes / run blood and the girl disappears / into the wolf’s dark throat. / You understand the good // must be punished…” and so would be “the queen whose word // is wicked, who conjures smoke / and poison.” (26) Everywhere in these poems, there is energy just below the surface ready to explode. And the surface is explored the way it might be explored on a road trip – Graceland, Tupelo, Moab, Amarillo, Gallup – where everything you see in passing is new, and it makes the world strange in passing.

This is a beautiful collection, full of music and light on a landscape that could be abandoned as bleakly familiar. Pierce has written herself in with grace, humor, and insight that make the book a pleasure to read.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Catherine Pierce. Famous Last Words. Philadelphia: Saturnalia Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9754990-7-8.

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the graves grow bigger between generations

I always approach a new book of poetry the way one wanders through a foreign city after arriving, weaving through narrow streets and alleys, jet-lagged and happy, enjoying the dreams. Only later do I pull out a map for directions.

After noting the cover of Jared Smith’s new book, a photo of dark smokestacks and billowed pollution, I knew that he would continue in this collection to convey his love of the natural world and his regret of its desecration by industry and the corporate greed that fathers it. I also knew, from the title, that this author of six previous books of poetry would explore the vastness of time and space, the closeness of familial ties, and the weariness of the American worker in the tradition of Sandburg and Whitman, with a touch of Studs Terkel thrown in.

I started at the end with poems about the state of baseball, the sight of dead geese and rabbits, and the thoughts in the mind of a cow. What all these poems have in common is the disconnect between inner contentment and the noncommittal violence of nature unbalanced, the nostalgia for the humanity of everyday life versus some new kind of threat posed by the harsh political and economic realities of the Twenty-first Century. In “Poetry and Baseball and Pay-As-You-Go,” the poet contrasts the million-dollar salaries of sports celebrities with “the chrome real men sweated over for most of their lives in / dark rocky mines and dark musty factories and dark were their lives.” Even poetry is a business of sorts, and even poets must make a living: “It’s not like street yard baseball, this poetry thing anymore,/where you used to lean back with whatever piece of wood you found/lying around and hit each clunker of coal as far as it would go.” In these lines, the poet reclaims the carefree days of my own childhood when, as an inveterate tomboy, I played stickball one-handed in an empty lot, and decades later have also faced the conflict between the spontaneous creation of art and the relentless labor for a paycheck.

The same anxiety echoes in “At Breakfast with All the King’s Men,” in which “something slow is happening in the mind of a cow,” connecting the blankness, the perhaps-madness, of the cow with the corruption and degradation that has survived and flourished “long after Robert Penn Warren” wrote his justly-celebrated novel.

In “Something New is Hunting,” the griefs of nature are unnamed but nevertheless palpable: “For fifty-seven years I’ve walked the evening streets / and felt comfort in the wind of stars . . . .But something new is hunting closer to the bone now . . . .” These almost frightening lines remind the reader of the increased fragmentation of nature, a pessimistic yet realistic commentary that human greed and folly return to haunt us, and there is no going back.

The demise of nature as we know it pervades the book, but sprinkled into the dark longer poems are small personal glimpses, such as “With Sunsets,” “What I Take To My Grave,” “After Twenty-Five Years,” “A Prayer in the Teeth of Time,” and “Learning to Breathe,” where lovers and children and aging emerge in succinct lines that are as powerful as the broad eloquence for which Smith is better known. In fact, the tightness of these brief poems will surprise and delight the reader familiar with “Lake Michigan and Other Poems,” a sprawling meditation, celebration, and elegy in lengthier pieces. Now, in Smith’s own words, “I’m glad myself / to think of little things that carry weight.”

The place of the poet in contemporary society, which ends the book in Smith’s final couplet of the baseball poem, appears in greater detail earlier in the book. In “Poets,” the refrain, “The enemies of our leaders are poets,” begins rather than ends each stanza, and in one verse, continues: “. . . not good men necessarily, not all, but neither are they men who fire hell-fire missiles / into mud-bricked homes in the desert . . .” Similar hard-hitting anti-war statements emerge in “Who Carries this Message?” “Why Put Up with this Anymore?” and “Whatever Happened to Johnny Rebel?” which bring the arrogant military escapades of current and past administrations back to their origins in corporate board rooms that control money and guns. “It’s American as cherry pie,” Smith cynically observes. Still other poems, such as “Lowered Expectations in the Lower 48” and “So You Say You Got A Job” force the reader to connect the dots between the suffering of both blue-collar and white-collar workers and a decline in democracy and morality.

Smith’s world encompasses airports, digital communication, offices buildings and construction sites, parks, woodlands, and Chicago alleys, and in all these settings, courage and joie de vivre contrast markedly with despair. Compassion survives misery, but just barely. The sprawling emotions of the title poem say it well: “I swear I’m going to remember this, and forget the graves, / and forget the markers and forget the names, but I’m going to remember / the smell of furniture polish on old oak banisters, and the dust of books, / and the coolness of old stone buildings in sleepy towns on summer days . . . the depth of shadowed rooms, a silent ray of light, purple flowers and a woman’s touch. The graves get ever bigger from one generation to the next.” That Carnegie left libraries (such as the one in the photograph at the beginning of the book) to small towns as well as empires to the greedy is some small consolation to those who long for the civility and wisdom and humanity represented by these microcosms of learning.

Smith is unafraid of content in an age when poetry often has nothing to say, and even less on the page except for brilliant wordplay. Smith confronts the major issues of our time, going beyond the merely glib. In his title poem, “The Graves Grow Bigger . . .” he invites the reader into the slow, deep wisdom of the years, reflecting the triumph of ordinary human beings engaged in the sweat and sacrifice of everyday living, never underestimating the toll that industry takes on individuals, society, and the natural world, but salvaging the dignity of the work which leads us to our graves, generation to generation.

One of my favorite poems is “Having Never Wanted to Own the Business,” in which the narrator spins out powerful images of life in the business world, highlighting the false sense of importance bestowed on workers by corporate identity: “Just to hear someone say my name one time during the day . . . “ He pulls the reader into the poem as energy gathers at the end: “And I come to you to plea . . . . / absolutely filled with dismay, / that those of us who are breaking away have broken away the same way you are breaking away.” The plea that ends the poem is to touch the only real thing, love, before it is too late: “I come to you tired and heavy with the arguments of salesmen / who have died in unwashed alleys holding photos of their children.” And even that love, so dramatically portrayed here, can also be illusory.

reviewed by Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois

Jared Smith, The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations. Higganum, CT: Higganum Hill Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0977655687.

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the way of the wind

Ken Hada is unequivocally a poet of place, and his poetry is at its best when it clears a space where readers can dwell for a time in “the gypsum hills of northwest Oklahoma and the Ozarks of north Arkansas.” There are moments in The Way of the Wind when this happens almost flawlessly — as in “The Windmill” (12), which “creaks and groans / the belt squeaking in prairie wind, / wrinkled blades twirling / in tired momentum / unbalanced.” We can see it, but we can hear it as well — especially in the direct discourse of the short first line — no simile, just the sound an old windmill makes in prairie wind, here and now. And in “A Cedar Grove” (15), “Musing in wild / transcendence, / buoyant bluebirds / sing me back.” The alternation between lines of four syllables and three throughout the poem evokes something of the rhythm of a bluebird’s song.

The book is divided into three sections, and the strongest poems (because they are most direct) come in part three, “Singing of Transience,” where moon is “Just a sliver / of light,” smoke is “incense returning / to vials / from the temple / of the gods /of Autumn” (21), and blood is “as familiar / as it is foreign, / ordinarily strange / like turning leaves.” Hada comes to blood by way of “Red-tipped fescue / red sumac, ivy, / cedar bark and berries –” in a place where “even the water is red” (62).

Writing of Hada’s collection, Texas poet laureate Larry Thomas says “if the timeless red dirt of Oklahoma could speak, this book would be its forceful utterance.” At its best, that’s exactly what it is — Oklahoma red dirt singing. Readers who know Oklahoma will recognize familiar tunes and sing along. Those who don’t know Oklahoma but listen will hear it here in the rhythm and words of Ken Hada’s poems.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Kenneth Hada. The Way of the Wind. Cheyenne, Oklahoma: Village Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9791510-7-1.

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broken and reset

The arrangement of Broken and Reset makes reading it something like visiting an archaeological excavation: while we don’t do the digging ourselves, we see evidence that it has been done. We stand on the rim of the dig and look down across forty years of poetry—and, as we read, we work our way to the bottom through four groups.

The first covers ten years and includes substantial selections from Myth Waking: Homeric Hymns, A Modern Sequel and Lost Gardens. The former is motivated by a sense of the “metaphoric usefulness” of things (Greek gods, in this case) thought dead. That is not a bad characterization of much of Price’s poetry, which often seems directed toward resurrections—of gods, of myths, of memories.

The second group, slightly smaller, covers a longer period, from 1994-1978. This section is dominated by a selection from Seven Deadly Sins, which Price describes (388) as “mock sermons . . . cast, irreverently, as artificial sonnets.” While the comment was originally part of the introduction, in this collection it falls at the end of the book as a note. The move is important because it is not clear from the poems themselves that they are mock sermons, and there is nothing inherently irreverent about the sonnet form in which they are presented. Though they don’t adhere to traditional meter or rhyme schemes, they are broken into fourteen lines. After the note, one is left wondering what might constitute a non-artificial sonnet.

And then comes an interesting outcropping low in the dig—a series of “Christmas” poems that covers almost the entire period of the book. These poems are dominated by the season—as much Winter as Christmas, including the association of Winter with death.

And finally, another group covering just over a decade, 1965-1977. Near the end of this final section (and thus in one of the earliest poems included in the collection, “Overworked”), Price writes that “Poems are, crudely, / fingerprints of the mind, left on a certain place / at a certain time. They are meant to remind, / not define…” (375).

The emphasis on mind perhaps explains the abstraction of many of these poems—a poetry of ideas more than a poetry of place, that often seems directed toward jogging the memory. Where that jogging paints people and places, it makes beautiful poems (as in “Laramie,” 7, which begins, “Beethoven grass / teasing and rolling /through the high alone, / surrounding us / with inner spaces /as far as we can breathe, intimate / as not being seen…”) that explode into provocative thoughts (as in the last four lines of  the same poem, “money is just / ticks and lice in the beautiful / fur of the music / bounding over the hills.”) Particularly in the newer poems, Price breaks lines and scatters them across the page to make poems of the eye that seem always out of breath. Such breaks sometimes overcome the sense that these poems are sermons incognito—and may be intended to express the “uneasiness” with piety and institutional religion that Price mentions in the introduction to Seven Deadly Sins, the last word in this collection. But the fingerprints of a lingering piety too often overwhelm certain places, certain times. I would be happy with a less visible mind, more Beethoven grass “intimate / as not being seen.”

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

V. B. Price. Broken and Reset: Selected Poems, 1966-2006. University of New Mexico Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8263-4157-0.

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all that road going

In All That Road Going, A. G. Mojtabai takes the well-worn tradition of the American road novel and makes it new. By choosing a title and an epigraph from Jack Kerouac, she makes the connection with the tradition explicit. But the epigraph from Alfred Corn’s April turns it: “…It’s over. The world wakes up.” And Kerouac’s phrase, “all that road going,” is spoken in Mojtabai’s novel by a downwardly mobile chemist who names it for its oppressive weight, not for the freedom it promises.

The novel is set on a long-haul bus ride in the middle of America – mostly between the Texas Panhandle and St. Louis, leaving passengers mostly in the dark and uncertain whether they are in Oklahoma or Missouri. We come to know that they are in the middle of the middle of a journey in which beginning and end are equally inaccessible: the road goes on forever. The road is what is now Interstate 40 and Interstate 44 – what used to be Route 66, and that locates the novel not on the “underside” of America but in its heart. That the vehicle is a Greyhound bus full of passengers more trapped than footloose turns the familiar image of the road as possibility inside out.

Mojtabai’s work is mostly character driven, and, since her first novel, Mundome, she has been fascinated with possibilities created by their chance collisions – in this case, in the form of a seemingly random collection of characters who have nothing in common but the fact of being trapped “on the road” for an extended bus journey. She moves through conversations that are most often parallel stories rather than real exchanges. (In an earlier work, she spoke of circles of pantomime with impermeable boundaries.) By forcing characters and their stories together in the close space of a bus, Mojtabai pushes boundaries toward a critical mass so every possible opening can be tested. It is this testing of boundaries that drives the action of the novel; and, as we might expect where a critical mass is building, there is an explosion.

We get to know several of the characters pretty well, mostly by eavesdropping on conversations intended to pass the time, but also by catching glimpses of the world through their eyes. Mojtabai gathers all of these characters together with us as a great “cloud of witnesses” to witness the heart of America.

Two phrases leap from the novel: “¿Dondé quieres ir?” and “You can’t get lost in America.” The first, a sign in the Greyhound station, calls to mind the Cheshire Cat’s response to Alice, lost, when she asks him which way she ought to go from here. He says it depends on where you want to get to; and when she says she doesn’t much care, he says it doesn’t much matter, because you’re bound to get somewhere if you just keep going long enough. The second, spoken by the bus driver when he is undeniably lost, calls to mind just how powerful the combination of fear and denial can be – especially in the dark on an unfamiliar road. “Anywhere but here” is the most common answer to the first question. And the driver, lost, simply plunges forward hoping for a sign. The novel ends with “a man weeping in darkness–”

Mojtabai writes compellingly, and she is a master at sketching characters. Drawing characters together in a great cloud of witnesses, she manages here to focus attention on some of the most important questions of our time and place – questions that retain their significance in any time and place where readers find themselves on the way, in the middle, in the dark.

Mojtabai directs her readers’ attention to the heart of America, not asking “what’s the matter with Kansas” (or Amarillo, or Missouri) but reminding us that “this raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge… all that road going…” is America.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

A. G. Mojtabai. All That Road Going. Northwestern University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8101-5200-2

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brotherkeeper and chasing the saints

Poetry and spirituality have long walked the same intellectual pathways, closely bonded cousins, if not quite fraternal twins. The Bible itself contains some of the world’s oldest, best- known poetry. Throughout the ages, great mystics like John of the Cross in Catholicism, and Jalaluddin Rumi in the Sufi tradition, wrote poetry, as if poems were natural heirs to a life of prayer and contemplation. Arguably the most popular poet in America today is Mary Oliver, whose explorations of nature almost always lead to meditations on the life of the spirit. Oliver’s is a poetry of both the natural and metaphysical worlds, the body and the soul.

The priest-poet is also a time-honored tradition. John Donne was an Anglican priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins a Jesuit, and Thomas Merton a Trappist monk. Larry Janowski is a Franciscan priest from Chicago. His first collection, BrotherKeeper, is out from Puddin’head Press. His is one of two poetry collections with spiritual themes to emanate from Chicago in the past year. The other is Chasing the Saints from Virtual Artists Collective by Donna Pucciani.

Janowski writes with gritty reverence about the city. He finds moments of transcendence even in the grim daily headlines of The Chicago Tribune. Pucciani’s book is a series of profiles and persona poems about Catholic saints. She subtitled the book “Poetic Encounters,” and approaches her subjects much as a tell-all biographer might. She gives us a St. Francis with dirt under his nails, a Teresa of Avila who fears deep water and dislikes fishcakes.

Neither collection, happily, descends into the pious, sentimental, didactic or devotional tone that plagues what often passes for “religious” poetry. If both collections are “religious” at all, it comes from one of the original senses of the word: to look upon the world with awe. Both collections confirm a belief I’ve long held, that much of contemporary poetry is spiritual. It’s a view that runs contrary to conventional wisdom and would dismay those post-modern, post-narrative writers who believe experience has largely stripped language of meaning. But the fact is, many contemporary poems uncover the sacred in the ordinary. God may merit nary a mention in these poems, but God is in them, in the details.

Chicago is Father Janowski’s “City Of God” and his “Interior Castle.” Its immigrants, second-and-third generation Poles and Irish, its street people, sales people and daily commuters are his modern-day prophets. The title poem of the collection relates the true story of an eight-year-old boy who witnessed his younger brother plummet from a window in the Ida B. Wells housing project. (A group of boys had dangled the five-year-old out a 14th story window as punishment for refusing to steal candy). The older boy desperately races down flights of stairs to try and catch his younger brother. Two Chicago boys, the poet says “I never knew, who will not let go: “…falling / is / like drowning // …but air cares even less / than water, lets you / slip through / without even a wake / to mark your passing … (1)

Janowski reads the urban landscape as if it were a book of Scripture. It’s reading that sometimes ends in solace, sometimes in insight, but more often than not, in mystery. In “Get Your Streetwise!” (the title refers to a newspaper homeless people hawk on corners for a dollar), Janowski encounters a feisty street person who accuses him of harboring a gun in his shoulder satchel (18):

I
always hold the bag like that
don’t want it to slam into people
never touched a gun
can turn it inside out
spill guts on the street
here
look
ungraded papers
poetry books
candy wrappers
look look
pencils
nothing

Many of his poems are odes to the city where he grew up, and where he teaches writing at Wright Community College and says Masses for a small community of Felician Sisters on the Northwest side. In “Luminaria” (35), he writes:

Chicago eats light, sucks it in
like a black hole, hoards it
like a radium dial planning
to stay awake all night because
light – like the grass and flesh
we devour, decays. We
need more. Always. But
unlike broad green leaves
that take their sun straight,
we cannot look full on light
and live. We need the tempering
of angels, moons, or cities …

Janowski mostly shies away from poems that describe his life in a men’s religious order. (“St. Francis used to say, when you have an experience of God, you shouldn’t talk about it because you’re somehow wasting it,” he has said). But there are deft references throughout the poems. He savors the hairdresser’s touch washing his hair. He looks with self-mocking humor at his naked body which “no one sees … except in the eyes off / locker room kind of glance.” Those poems that do deal with his priestly life are searing and authentic. In “What Celibacy Is” (48), he takes an unsentimental look at the vow he took to forgo sexual intimacy.

If this is what
it costs to hold
at heart a hollow
where no sparrow
lives (nothing alive
that needs light),

if this is what God
expects from Yes,
then it is too much
today, although
I pay it anyway …

To read Janowski’s poems is to gain a deeper level of seeing and believing, to arrive at a place, as Mary Oliver once described it, where one sees “through heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles.”

Like Janowski, Pucciani is a poet of the sacred in the ordinary. Her collection Chasing the Saints builds on the premise that what makes these men and women holy is, in many ways, their very ordinariness. Her cast of characters includes well-known luminaries: St. Michael the Archangel, St. Patrick, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Paul and St. Anthony. But there are lesser-knowns too, like Blessed Kateri Tekawitha, a Mohawk Indian not yet a full-fledged saint, but on her way to canonization; St. Lutgarde, a 13th Century Belgian monastic who levitates at prayer, and San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples. A vial of his dried blood is said to periodically liquify and bubble up in its case.

Occasionally, Pucciani steps out of ancient times into the present or near-present, as when she describes her grandmother Giuseppina’s bedroom shrine to St. Therese of Lisieux (33):

Black-veiled, brown-robed, with strawberry lips
and wimberry eyes and hands full of roses,
you stand a foot tall on the nightstand
alongside St. Francis, a bird on his left shoulder,
Jesus, his actual heart exposed and beating
in arterial splendor, and Mary in chipped blue robes
that need a good dusting …

But Pucciani, a public school teacher who has written two previous collections, is at her best when she is imagining new narratives for her pious subjects. St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases, is reduced to hearing the pleas of the aged in nursing homes, who expect, well, miracles. St. Anthony, finder of lost items, has wearied of the people who can’t even locate what’s under their noses (6).

…Favorite item today:
umbrellas – it seems to be raining everywhere
from Hong Kong to Beirut. Yesterday: sunglasses
especially in Australia …

St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians, endures an eternal rest eternally interrupted by drummers, flutists, oboe players, and constant strains of Vivaldi, Wagner, jazz and Motown (10):

At night I leave them to their own devices
in jazz clubs or locked in practice rooms
drinking black coffee and running arpeggios
into the ground. But I promise I will wake them
in the early clear-throated morning, gargled,
lozenged and rosined, knuckle-cracked and ready to play …

Despite her flights of imagination, Pucciani does stay close to the historical record, quoting often from the saints’ own writings (A final entry in St. Teresa of Avila’s breviary: Hold God, and naught shall fail thee). Many previous poetry collections have recast narratives of the Bible. It is a wonder that the saints have not come in more often for this same type of re-envisioning. Ms. Pucciani does it with humor and aplomb.

reviewed by Judy Valente, Normal, Illinois (This review first appeared in The Cresset, Trinity 2008. Follow this link for a pdf of the original review.)

Larry Janowski. BrotherKeeper. Chicago: Puddin’head Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9724339-5-2.

Donna Pucciani. Chasing the Saints. Virtual Artists Collective, 2008. ISBN 0-9772974-6-2.

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painting the borrowed house

In Painting the Borrowed House, Kate Rogers celebrates place without standing still. We move with her poems from becoming lao wei (foreigner) to being at home in “thinking about where / I’ve been and where I’m going next” (60) –even at those moments when we can’t wait to “be automatic.” One of the most striking aspects of the collection is the clarity with which it documents parallel processes of becoming lao wei and settling into a place where being automatic is a real possibility.

The book is divided into three sections, each associated with a particular place (though the third combines two) — “Becoming Lao Wei” (China), “Being Pale” (Hong Kong), and “Painting the Borrowed House” (Taiwan and Hong Kong). That three of the places are distinguished from China though all are China speaks volumes about the new China and about each of the places distinguished.

It is the mainland where the poet becomes a foreigner, an experience vividly captured in the first poem of the collection: “A child again, I am / alone with my myth of this country” (18). Like a child, the poet keeps pace with a Shanghai that is reinventing itself 24 hours a day. Like the child of “a lean mother, with no lap to sink into,” she learns practicality. Like a snake, she sheds her skin. All are images of beginning and beginning again, and those are as apt for China as for a stranger making the transition from passing through a place to living there. Images in the first section of the book are more vivid for being images of a child reinventing herself: “matching slippers slap / the pavement in a show of applause. And all these casual / loungers and strollers make nonsense of my old dream: kids / laughing at me because I’d worn a nightgown to school, / and passed no mirrors on the way” (21). This is a second naivete, making nonsense of one childhood while drawing on another to hear China as well as to taste it and see it.

The second section, too, makes space by drawing places together. While we learn Hong Kong with Rogers, she recalls Canada and dreams “of snow / muffling Hong Kong. Of flakes sifting down to glint in my hair, melt / their cold kisses on my cheeks. Of a darkening sky / shedding its stars, turning the universe inside out….” (29). This is more than nostalgia, more than an image of homesickness. It is an illustration of the way eyes formed in a place form other places, making old and new equally strange. The transition from “becoming” to “being” is not complete — and we have good reason to suspect it never will be. Recalling the image of being a child alone with the myth of a country, “Chung Yeung: Lamma Island 2006″ brilliantly evokes the settling into new myths that is part of making oneself at home, the other side of eyes formed forming: settling into new myths (new, at least, to the settler) transforms old eyes, here in the process of climbing a mountain: “we seek the highest point / to save ourselves and the family / friends have become, from historic danger” (34). Reenacting a myth is part of the ritual process by which friends become family and strangers become friends who are at home. The third verse of the poem transposes this to a cosmic level in the form of a question: “In twenty years, after the poles have melted, / the white bears of my northern / home become myth, / and the sea has reclaimed Hong Kong, / who will tell // the story of Chung Yeung? Who will offer / the children rainbows / as the flood waters rise?” (35) “A Book of Birds” (36-37), too, makes space between Canada and Hong Kong. The poet remembers her mother and writes “Gravity, momentum and other forces of nature brought me here. / Still, I often face north, feeling the pull of my country / and its raw bones full of iron. Think of my mother living / in opposite time, on the other side of the world” (36). That forces of nature brought her here (Hong Kong) as surely as they’d brought her as a child into Canada is another remarkable insight into the becoming that makes it possible to be at home.

The final section shares the title of the whole collection, and that title is a metaphor for the moment at which a borrowed house becomes home. Typically, one doesn’t begin painting until one is settled — though the house is still borrowed. That image is applied particularly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it highlights the extent to which Hong Kong has become the borrowed house in which Ryan is settled enough to paint. This in spite of the vivid evocation of earthquakes that “live on / in my body” (49) and (in the title poem) the observation that “a stairwell is simply a place to pause / before opening another door” (52). That pause flavors these poems: “These days my shadow is practicing / to be my ghost. It might prefer / to wander through cloisters with / submerged hands and invisible feet…. // …Become a tapestry / of myself in the Middle Ages. / But a stone cell loses / heat quickly as the light fades. / The single bed is too narrow / for my restless heart” (56, 57). The “Nunnery at Diamond Hill” gives the poet pause, but, being a traveler, she needs a different sort of hermitage.

In the second to last poem there is an image that casts considerable light on the whole” “I want to raise my camera, / capture the colours of their flight, / but will not startle with the flash. // Sitting on a low concrete wall, / I begin this poem” (58). One might think this is about birds, though it is about a group of “little nuns” receiving new robes. Rogers has published a collection of essays on birdwatching, conservation, and culture, so it is no surprise that her knowledge and experience in those areas would inform her poems. But it is particularly interesting that the poem takes the place of the camera here, precisely because the flash of the camera would spoil the scene — but the poem doesn’t. And that, I think, is startling enough to keep our eyes open even when we become sufficiently settled to become automatic in whatever strange places we inhabit.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Kate Rogers. Painting the Borrowed House. Hong Kong: Proverse, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99668-4-3

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not exactly job

Nathan Brown’s Not Exactly Job stands in a long tradition of Biblical commentary that is at once conversation and poetry — poetry in conversation with poetry.

Don’t be misled by my calling it “commentary.” It is not academic — and it is certainly not sectarian. In fact, it’s not exactly “religious” in the way people often mean. It’s more like a conversation with a friend — and that’s a preaching style Brown probably soaked up in years of being immersed (as the son of a preacher) in a Southern Baptist tradition that has produced its share of “conservative” resistance to dealing “head on” with “hard-hitting” questions — but also pastors “in the true sense of that word” who (as Brown says of his father) have fielded “blunt questions” and “profane poems” with “grace, openness and wisdom.”

That could describe Brown’s response to the “profane” poem that is Job. In “Missing God,” he writes “Theologians wax prophetic all over / the obvious reasons God must have / for occasionally going on a vacation / …when He’s gone… / He’s just gone, man. / Yet I am not silenced / by the darkness” (23). And in “Ways to Survive,” “But you were a poet too, Job. / That’s why I read your book” (40). Job, Brown writes, “grieves like a poet . . . like a groping/ philosopher. And, even though I may not / know what he means, I feel like I do. / And I feel like he feels it too, more / than he knows” (26).

Like all Brown’s poetry, this little collection is filled with humor and grace, in spite of “bursting,” as he puts it, “out of a very dark time” in his life. Like Job, he ends with an epilogue: “And Elihu? God never even bothers / to speak the punk’s name. // And Job gets all his stuff back, / twofold — like a blues song gone wrong. / All his flaky friends come back to roost” (42). Brown’s collection ends where Job ends: “like God and Satan / had overextended the budget / and decided to wrap things up / quickly: // And so he died” (43).

As an added bonus, some of Brown’s black and white photos of western Oklahoma are interspersed with the text and featured on the cover, a reminder that, even in conversation with an ancient poem that more than one religious canon has struggled to contain, Brown’s work is a poetry of place, rooted in his experience of Oklahoma and the southwestern United States.

He’s talking with Job, but he’s hoping (as his preface suggests) that others who’ve been subjected to “the modern, conservative Christianity that reigns here in the Southwest” that “seldom if ever deals head-on with the true discussion, the hard-hitting questions that live at the heart of this Old Testament book” — particularly those subjected to it when dealing with “very dark times” — are listening in.

Given the state of U.S. politics and its impact on the world, that includes an audience of potential eavesdroppers far beyond Brown’s Southwest.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Nathan Brown. Not Exactly Job. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9801684-0-2.

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