Take a poem to lunch

Have you read any delicious poems lately? You can recognize them by their crisp images and yummy words.

Similar to vitamins and minerals needed to replenish weary body cells, poems can replace junk-food thoughts with revitalizing nutrients for the body, mind, and soul.

A problem comes, however, in trying to find appealing poems to devour. Many of them go on and on with nothing new to give those of us who want more than empty calories or rehashed left-overs. Some poems make us turn up our noses at their saccharine sweetness while others seem gross enough to make us gag!

Poems need to be smooth, edible, and not stick in the throat.

Poems need texture, salt, spice, and a colorful garnish.

Poems need to be more melodic than a dinner bell.

As a lifelong lover of poetry, I’ve had the joy of sampling poems with enough variety for almost any taste. A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of those recommendations in “Favorite poets, poetry, and why.” Since then, new works have come to my attention as review copies arrived from poetry book publishers. I’ve undoubtedly missed many, but the following links can help to expand your versatile menu for a healthy, creative life of poetry:

Poetry by some of my favorite poets:

The Life and Death of Poetry: poems by Kelly Cherry

Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns

Songs from a Wild Place and Estuaries by Jason Kirkey

Eyes Have I That See by priest-poet John Julian

Remembering Softly: a life in poems by Catherine Lawton

Anthologies with works by many poets:

St. Peter’s B-List, anthology

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry


Reviews by poet-author Mary Harwell Sayler
…

Christian Poet Scott Cairns

Scott Cairns collected his poems in a new book entitled Slow Pilgrim, which recollects his pilgrimage as a Christian in many of the poems.

Using the concept he refers to as “sacramental poetics,” Cairns brings together theology and poetry as did poets of the past, who saw this connectedness in the “Logos.” Indeed, as the Introduction to the book reminds us, “The Greek word for ‘word’ is logos, familiar to us from the opening of the Gospel of St. John. But Cairns believes that in modern Western thought logos has too often reduced ‘word’ to disembodied abstraction. He prefers the Hebrew word davar, which means both word and thing – and even, as he notes, a power.”

And “yet one of the key milestones along his pilgrimage has been his embrace of the Orthodox tradition of ‘apophatic’ theology, which is an expression of humility before the inadequacy of language.” This apophatic theology helps us to know God by stating Who or What God is not, rather than Who or What God is. For example, when we say God is immortal, we’re saying God does not die. Or if we call God a Spirit, we’re saying God isn't confined to a physical form as we are. Or if we say God is truth, we’re saying God does not lie.

Often Christian poets and writers rely on metaphor or analogy to equate God with this or that. Or perhaps we present a particular point-of-view or communicate an experience. Conversely, Cairns’ pilgrimage is more inclined to take us from communication into communion, slowing us down, so we can listen between the lines and hear the silence that arises into worship or poetry.

This is not, however, a devotional book, nor collection of inspirational writings. As the Introduction tells us, these “poems address us in our quotidian experience of life: they are best experienced in an armchair, not in church.”

For example, “Taking Off Our Clothes” strips us down to our real selves where:

“We’d talk about real things, casually
and easily taking off our clothes. We would be
naked and would hold onto each other a long time,
saying things that would make us
grin. We’d laugh off and on, all the time
unconcerned with things like breath, or salty
skin, or the way our gums show when we really
smile big. After a while, I’d get you a glass of water.”

This use of the visible, the tangible rather than the abstract, calls us to recognizable truths, such as how getting real with ourselves and each other makes us feel naked. In these times of vulnerability, we might do nothing more God-like than bringing each other a cup of cool water in Christ’s name.

Since the poem just quoted in part comes at the beginning of the book, readers will know upfront not to expect anything sentimental or puritanical. Having squirmed through too many of the latter types of poems or flat statements of belief or long-winded diatribes, a subtle invitation to find God among real people in real life can, itself, be as refreshing as that glass of water.

This time I knew to expect such an approach as the publisher, Paraclete Press, who kindly sent me a review copy, had done the same last year for Cairns’ book, Idiot Psalms. However, to claim familiarity with the work of this respected poet would be misleading as I suspect I’ll never fully catch what’s compressed into each poem.

Sometimes this slowness to comprehend occurs because of differences in male and female perspectives but also because of the poet’s artistry in drawing negative spaces that may or may not be filled with God’s invisible presence. That said, Cairns can use metaphor well when he wants to as shown in the poem “4. Mortal Dream” where “It is not a very clean city, even the air has fingerprints.”

For the most part, though, I found the poems accessible and occasionally amusing. For example, “5. My Imitation” begins:

“I sold my possessions, even the colorful pencils.
I gave all my money to the dull. I gave my poverty
to the president. I became a child again, naked
and relatively innocent. I let the president have my guilt.”

But what seems to be humorous turns into a common union with Christ as the poem continues:

“I found a virgin and asked her to be my mother.
She held me very sweetly.”

And ends:

“I rose again, bloodless and feeling pretty good.

I forgave everything.”

Unlike the sweet greeting card verses that assure us all is well even when it isn’t, I’m more attuned to the hope we have in Christ when reading such lines as: “And still I have suffered/ an acute lack of despair.” Yes! How true!

Besides our lack of despair, aren’t we all archaeologists? As shown in “Archaeology: A Subsequent Lecture,” we see:

“…the pleasure lies

in fingering loose ends toward likely shape,
actually making something of these bits
of persons, places, things one finds once one

commences late interrogation
of undervalued, overlooked terrain –
what we in the business like to call the dig.”

In addition to digging through our collective or individual past, these poems give us a new take on familiar Bible stories such as told in the poem “The Entrance of Sin.” In its departure from the Genesis 3 story, the second paragraph of this prose poem offers a prior scenario:

“For sin had made its entrance long before the serpent spoke, long before the woman and the man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite without flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man’s hand and he withheld it.”

I love that a man wrote those lines! And I welcomed the insight into relationships today. I also enjoyed the dry humor, as in “Possible Answers To Prayer,” where:

“Your petitions – though they continue to bear
just the one signature – have been duly recorded.”

Then these exquisite lines in “I. Nativity” give us a glimpse of that biblical scene as told from the perspective of a man gazing on a woman beloved:

“As you lean in, you’ll surely apprehend
the tiny God is wrapped
in something more than swaddle. The God

is tightly bound within
His blessed mother’s gaze….”

The poem continues:

“…Overhead,

the famous star is all
but out of sight by now; yet, even so,
it aims a single ray

directing our slow pilgrims to the core
where all the journeys meet,
appalling crux and hallowed cave and womb,

where crouched among these other
lowing cattle at their trough, our travelers
receive that creatured air, and pray.”


©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer in all genres and lifelong lover of Christ, the Bible, and poetry


Slow Pilgrim, quality paperback



…

Poetry Book Review: Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns

In Idiot Psalms, just published by Paraclete Press, Scott Cairn’s new book of poetry takes off with “High Plane,” an almost sonnet, almost blank verse poem whose musicality makes melodious revisions in the tentative descriptions of flight, life, and the divide between knowing and remaining open to the unknown. The poem and its placement before the beginning of the IV sections give us a preface and a hint of the poetic questionings yet to come.

In the first poem of the first section, for example, “Parable” asks “To what might this slow puzzle be compared?” as we try out metaphors that might clarify the mystery of “The Vast and Inexplicable” even though none “quite seems to satisfy.”

Gliding on to “Threnody,” I halted mid-flight to look up the title word, which means a lament that, in this instance, refers to a recurrent dream of a deceased parent, returning where “none of us/ dares speak, neither of his death nor/ of his sudden, startling return.” The inexplicable continues in “Irreducible is what I’m after,” where “words are more precise or less precise, but they/ are not exact…” so that “even as/ I speak I see my good intentions leaping clean/ beyond my reach….”

In “Idiot Psalm 1,” we encounter Isaak, just “shy/ of immolation,” who, having been let off the sacrificial hook, sees God as “Beloved if obliquely so.” Later, in “Idiot Psalm 4,” this son of Abraham admits, “If I had anything approaching,/ a new song, surely I would sing” – an admission most of us might well make from almost any unfavorable condition or position into which we’ve been tightly wedged for far too long. And yet, tension-relievers come as we “keep things metaphorical/ and in so doing hope to keep/ anxiety at bay….” or as we witness the wit drawn when “the sea will of occasion/ skip the boats like flat stones back to shore.”

Consistently, honest observation and insight speak through these poems such as “Two Trees,” where we might get beyond that initial quest for knowledge of good and evil and “move finally/ to the second tree, long/ abandoned, all but lost/ to tribal memory.” Although this tree of life “stands to quicken any who/ would care to eat of it,” the poem “Heavenly City” reminds us “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.”

And yet, the difficulty of the search does not deter Scott Cairns from seeking to define the mystery, for example, in “Idiot Psalm 10” where glimpses of God occur metaphorically as the “Hidden Hand upholding” and the “Great Zookeeper, attending” and the “Most Secret Agent of our numberless/ occasions….”

As we near the end of the book, the poem “Draw Near” concludes with this admission: “I have no sense of what this means to you, so little/ sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse/ of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.” That “Whom” clarifies with the “Annunciation” where “we all become/ the kindled kindred of a king whose birth/ thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.”

In that light of Christ, referred to as the “Holy One,” the final poem in this highly recommended book asks that we might come to “the cup, before the coal/ is set upon our trembling tongues, before/ we blithely turn and walk again into our many other failures” and somehow “apprehend something of the fear/ with which we should attend this sacrifice,/ for which we shall not ever be found worthy,/ for which – I gather – we shall never be prepared.”

©2014 Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


Idiot Psalms: New Poems, paperback