Communion of Saints: poems by Susan L. Miller

In Communion of Saints by Susan L. Miller, present-day people reflect saintly individuals of the past in a collection of poetic portraits grouped into four sections: Faith, Hope, Love, and Pax Et Bonum, before concluding with an epilogue and “Notes on the poems,” which readers might want to refer to from the start.

Published by Paraclete Press, who kindly sent me a complimentary copy to review, the book begins with a Foreword by award-winning poet Mark Doty, who says:

“I imagine it’s no accident that this surprising and moving book begins with a ‘manual for would-be saints’ and ends with a ruined, heartbroken wolf learning to be loved. To become a saint, the lesson might be, it is necessary to enter completely into one’s abjection, and then to give oneself over completely to what might provide for your hunger.”

As the opening poem, “Manual for the Would-Be Saint” begins with these lines:

“The first principle: Do no harm.
The second: The air calls us home.
Third, we must fill the bowls of others
before we drain our own wells dry.”

With nineteen principles in the poem to mull over, I found these two my favorites:

“The thirteenth, we practice forgiving Judas.
The fourteenth, we love Judas as ourselves.”

Being unfamiliar with some of the saints highlighted in these poems, I didn’t connect as well as I did with those whose stories I knew or whose work I’d read. Therefore, “Self-Portrait as St. John of the Cross,” spoke to me immediately then intensified with these closing lines:

“I know that even Christ

doubted his Father
for a moment, in his suffering, and cried out My God
why hast thou forsaken me? without

feeling your hand in his chest, that hand
that wraps itself around the human heart and presses gently
two times every second.”

In addition to those perceptive moments, the poet gives us fresh phrases as shown, for instance, in “Portrait of Father Santo as St. Anthony of Padua,” where the relics of St. Anthony’s bones:

“reminded me
that all we are, after we are, becomes
small and brown, as if time dyes our bodies
with tea and smoke.”

Considering the Master of fresh phrases, Miller writes of a potential moment when “Gerard Manley Hopkins Looks at a Cloud.”

“On his back, under a sea of stirring wisps,
Hopkins tries to find words for the cirrus,
the cumulus, the nimbostratus, the drifting crowd
of clouds like steam opening the sky.”

And then, going deeper into the imagined scene, the poet writes:

“He thinks of his heaviness,
his own bones a weight he must strive to stir.
He thinks of the clouds’ massive heft like the flesh
of the sky, a musculature sure and simple,
striated, spare, and strange: he is liftened then too,
all sinew and soul thrilled in the high reaches
of Christ’s clutches, to whom all things
are light, and lifted, and lifting.”

Since I quoted Mark Doty’s mention of “The Wolf of Gubbio,” which ends the book, I want you to:

“Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean
and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage
as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage” –

a wolf whose hunger terrifies “each living thing you encounter,” but who responds to kindness, affection, and food until:

“No longer ravenous, you slowly eat your fill,
then lie on your side as children rub your fur,
making their high-pitched sounds.

For the rest of your life, you never
hunger, fed at any door you pass through,
beloved and belonging. Would you
call it a miracle if you knew
that wherever you went,
someone provided for you?”


Poetry book review by Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes, Faces in a Crowd, and from Cladach Publishing the forth-coming book PRAISE!


Communion of Saints, paperback



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The Paraclete Poetry Anthology

Paraclete Press kindly sent me a complimentary copy of The Paraclete Poetry Anthology to review, and what a treasure it is! As the Foreword by former editor-publisher Jon M. Sweeney reminds us:

“Poems help us to quell doubts as well as raise questions. Poems help us explore our emotions and spark our imaginations. And they slow us down. To read a poem well is to go slowly, and every good poems resists what’s easy.”

An “easy” poem often tells us what a poet wants to say, instead of showing us. Often, too, the poet gets locked into a rhyme pattern that makes the easy poem a medley of sounds at the expense of sense, insight, or visual accompaniment.

By contrast, Mark S. Burrows, the editor of the anthology, discusses “A Sense of Presence” in his Introduction to “Poetry and the Education of the Soul.” He calls on poems to “animate our soul, that part of the self beyond the reach of worldly ambition and outward achievement. They hold before us the dimension of spiritual experience…..” and “initiate us into mystery.”

As the Introduction goes on to say: Poems “offer us language lifted into song, even if we must often learn to listen patiently for this music in the startlements of metaphor and unexpected syntax. In such ways poems turn aside from the didactic and speak primarily through innuendo and allurement, preferring indirection to more frontal modes of speech and leading us through and beyond the facts along often meandering paths of the imagination.”

Poetry helps us to notice, ponder, and pay attention. “For what matters is not that we grasp the poem, but it grasps us.”

If you’re a poet, the Introduction alone provides remarkable tutelage in writing. Then both poetry writers and readers can go on to enjoy the collection of poems that poet, professor, and editor Burrows chose according to his highly informed standards.

Take, for example, the first lines of the first poem in the book:

“On the threshold of the poem shake off the dust
the powder of hate from your soul
set aside passion
so as not to defile words.”

In the poem “Heavenly City,” Scott Cairns writes:

“…The world remains a puzzle,

no matter how many weeks one stands
apart from it, no matter how one tries

to see its troubled surfaces, or hopes
to dip beneath them for a glimpse of what it is

that makes this all appear to tremble so.”

In “Morning Lament” by the late Phyllis Tickle, to whom this anthology is dedicated, we catch another glimpse of poetry:

“In their awakened morning life,
They limply lie – my lilting lines –
Too labored now to fly,
And loosely hold in languid grasp
The half-remembered chants
Of lyrics lost in melody.”

Fr. John-Julian takes us on an insightful journey in “Long Wanderings” where:

“One chooses
and the other roads are gone,
wending
into foothills which
will always be horizon now
and never home –“

Thankfully editor-poet Mark S. Burrows translated a few poems by the Iranian poet SAID with lines such as these:

“look o lord
I don’t sing your praises
but I seek you
with my limbs
which I’ve tamed just for you
for I want to keep watch over your word
so that love may be found anew
and we win back our wildness.”

Toward the end of this highly recommended anthology, Editor Burrows also translates poems by Rilke, but in between his skilled translations you’ll find contemporary poets whose work you won’t want to miss.

Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer reviewer, ©2016

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology, paperback


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Review of St. Peter’s B-List

Recently I reviewed Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully on my blog, In a Christian Writer’s Life as the book includes essays on three major poets and writers who wrote from a strong perspective of faith in Jesus Christ: George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis. So, when I received a review copy of St. Peter’s B-List, I expected to review this highly recommended anthology on that blog too. However, these “Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints” fit better here as written by creative seekers whose views occasionally come across as bleak.

Besides making this collection a sign of our religious and literary times, the darker overtones contrast well with the approach taken in the previous review, showing poets and readers the wide range found in religious poetry. As stated in the Introduction, “For a work of art, be it a novel, drama, or poem, to be a ‘good’ work does not mean that the characters are drawn to be morally good but that their speech and actions follow the laws of probability in the human, or natural, world. Good works of literature have intrinsic artistic merit because they avoid sentimentality – the depiction of moral innocence at the expense of qualities of character that remind us of our need for redemption.”

While I see sentimental poems akin to greeting card verse at one extreme end of the spectrum, these poems approach the opposite end, which my poems sometimes do too. As the Introduction explains, such poems “remind us of our need for Christ, regardless of whether the poets themselves explicitly profess this concept in their poems.”

Edited by Mary Ann B. Miller and published by Ava Maria Press, each of the poems in St. Peter's B-List deals honestly with problems and concerns most of us can recognize in ourselves or relate to readily. From homemaking and mothering to showering or lying supine in prayer, the poems speak of a lifetime of topics with words that soothe, shock, amuse, or “put my foot on that first step” in “Desert Ascent.”

Equally commendable is the consistently high quality of the poems, whether written by people I’ve never heard of or by such acclaimed names as Pulitzer poet, Franz Wright, whose poem “Say My Name” ends with the uplifting word of the “Word that means you are loved.”

Ironically, the very quality of the poems keeps me from wanting to single out examples of the situations described, metaphors used, and fresh perspectives found. So, I’ll skip to the back where James Martin, S. J. , wrote an “Afterword,” I wish I’d read initially.

As he says, “The lives of the saints are poems./ In other words, one cannot fully understand a saint’s life from a purely rationalistic point of view. Strictly speaking, they do not make ‘sense’.” He goes on to explain how Mother Theresa, St. Damien, St. Francis, and others responded to God in mysterious ways that often seemed foolish. Or, as Rev. Martin puts it, “The saint’ lives shock….” He then ends with this challenge: “The most important truths about God are not reached with definitions and proofs but by poems and stories…. You are called to be a saint, too. What will your poem be?”


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


St. Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, paperback


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