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.
