Tag: Donna Pucciani

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a goldfinch instant

I usually read poetry books in pieces, at whim, leafing through the pages to scan whatever suits my mood of the moment. However, having glanced at the first few pages of “A Goldfinch Instant” by Paul Friedrich, I turned page after page until the very end. It grabbed me and didn’t let go. An artful juxtaposition of prose and haiku keeps tipping the reader back and forth in a kind of emotional mambo. Sweetness and violence pervade the imagery in equal measure. Reminiscences of children and parents, nature and the seasons, little pieces of life and death, all converge to create an emotional geography that matches the varieties of physical geography in the book: Mexico, India, Russia, Paris, and the American locales of Chicago, the Rockies, and the Golden Gate Bridge, among others. The writing is so intense that a sense of near-panic emerges, as if life were too short to contain all of this. And indeed, the most intense experiences appear in the briefer poems, just when the poet seems to promise something of a pause in the action. I even enjoyed reading the endnotes, which explain the poetic references to Mexican, Turkish, and Chinese images, and allusions to T.S. Eliot, Goya, and Durer; these attest to the fact that Friedrich is not only a fine poet but also a great scholar

Donna Pucciani, Wheaton, Illinois

Paul Friedrich, a goldfinch instant: Concord to India Haikus. virtual artists collective, 2010. ISBN 978-0-98198-989-1

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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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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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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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