A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic

 

When University Professors Press added the anthology A 21^st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic to their “Poetry, Healing, and Growth Series,” I happily received a writer’s copy as one of the fifty-three poets whose poems comprise this remarkable collection.

 

In the Introduction, editor Elayne Clift gives us a glimpse of the goal:

 

“International in scope, this collection offers validation, comfort, and support to those who have struggled with pandemic restrictions, sometimes with humor and always with compassion. Poems address coping with mundane acts of daily life, profound emotions inherent in the challenges we have been called upon to face during a frightening time, isolation, lack of physical intimacy, and ever-present anxieties. Offering perspectives derived from personal experience, poets from various cultures and age groups contribute to the literature of healthcare crises in deeply meaningful ways.”

 

But don’t just take her word and mine! See for yourself the richness of these selected poems:

 

In “Daily News,” for instance, poet Barbara Crooker writes:

 

“And so this day is like every other,
beginning with coffee and ending
with wine. But with nowhere
to go, and nothing to do, I’m
going to take my time, sit
in the morning sun and savor
the darkness, black and bitter.
In the larger world, terrible
things continue to happen.
Here, the only action
is the hummingbird zipping
and sipping sugar water,
jazzed on sweetness, in love
with the sun….”

“The End of Summer 2020” brings us these poignant lines by Judith Adams:

 

“Call for a convention of wild animals
So you can listen to their sorrow.
Ask forgiveness for history.
If you don’t know what you are here for,
sleep on the edge of the sea and let it
Breath for you.
One day you will be able
To kiss again….”

 

Free verse and traditional poems give voice to what we’ve been thinking, feeling, and doing for many months, and yet this very time of uncertainty and, often chaos, has also brought reminders to reassess our priorities and acknowledge what’s truly important. i.e., Enjoy the NOW of things. Pray and watch without ceasing for good to come from hard times.

Brother Richard Hendrick opens the door to praise in these uplifting lines from “Lockdown”:

 

“They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds sing again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
Across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
So that those who are alone
May hear the sounds of family….”

 

And look at these lines in “Face Mask” by Paul Hostovsky:

 

“Have you noticed
how beautiful
everyone looks 

when all you can see
are their eyes?”

 

The pandemic also encourages us to open our eyes to perspectives other than our own and relevant issues such as “Covid Times in Prison” by Tony Vick.

 

“God has been good to me, despite my bout with Covid. He brought people into my life when I needed them. But maybe the Mexican folktale holds some truth. God doesn’t need to photograph the poor and disenfranchised. He resides in their midst, loving them, knowing that we all must be free to seek a kinder, more compassionate world.

Without that, COVID-19 will be the least of our worries.”

 

May this excellent anthology help us to express our own fears and worries while reawakening us to beauty, joy, and the marvelous versatility of peoples and poetry.

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet and writer in all genres, including A Gathering of Poems

 

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Unpaused Poems: Real, Raw, Relevant

 

When Cathy Lawton, Editor-Publisher of Cladach Publishing, asked me to review Unpaused Poems by Alice Scott-Ferguson, I gladly agreed, especially since Cladach had published my book PRAISE!

 

My first impression of this new poetry book was its attractive cover art by Elaine Pedersen, who also illustrated the book’s interior. Then I noticed three clues to the poems themselves in the subtitle: “Real, Raw, Relevant.” Not only do those words reflect the contents of the book, but they hint at the word plays to come.

 

At first, though, the poet let us know in the Introduction that she wrote the poems when many of us faced: “An ongoing pandemic threatening to unmoor society as we have known it, and an all time low in race relations in the United States driving deeper divides among us. We have navigated a national election through a hostile highway of acrimony, angst, and anger.”

 

During this unique time in history, the poet addresses seven themes: “I. Hurting and Hoping,” “II. Ruminations and Reflections,” “III. Sensing Surroundings,” “IV. Takes on Theology,” “V. Voices of Women,” “VI. The Darker Side,” and “VII. The Lighter Side.”

 

In the first section of both hurt and hope, we find “The Open Grave” with these lines:

 

“We are bereft

 

“The casket, the dirt waiting to receive the remains

to cover him in the dark dirt of his island home

Then the larks – a pair of them soaring and swooping –

trill over the open grave

We lift our heads to see the song

of a pair of birds, a pair of lovers reunited!”

 

The second section demonstrates the poet’s affection for word plays:

 

Wearing Old

 

“I wear my old with

bold

below the fold, the news is

bright

the light of years distilled from

fears

that came and went

sent

in the nature of things….”

 

However, my favorite section, “IV. Takes on Theology,” tones down the sound echoes and reveals insight into God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For instance, “Plenty For All” reveals awareness of  Jesus Christ in these lines:

 

“They knew him by the breaking of the bread

        he who took less and made it more….”

 

In that same section, the last verse of “Where Is God?” provides this poignant picture:

 

“In the endless need

        he is everywhere

I last saw him

        in the form of a brave bilingual man

        picking up dead bodies

        left behind in the desert

        where they dropped in their weakness

        on the road to freedom”

 

Also in Section IV. of Unpaused Poems we have this verse from the poem, “The Lord’s Prayer.”

 

“Do we not partake daily of the living bread of life

feasting by faith on the Body of him

broken for our sake

sated and wanting nothing we already have

We have surely been fully and forever forgiven

Every accusation against us was driven

into those healing hands”

 

Other poems express faith, injustice, or social issues, while “Sequins Before Six” and “Observed at the Car Dealer,” deal with aging. In general, most readers will identify with the poems, but toward the end of the book, “Changes” happened to address my particular day’s frustration:

 

“My heart quakes, all exultant expectations eclipsed

        by the prospect of creating a new password

Do you have any idea how many of those I have already?

        No. I don’t even know”

 

I don’t know my exact number either, but at present, I have 12 columns of passwords, typed and scribbled in pencil, beside my desk. And this very day, I failed to log-in to my online bank account because a change of ownership necessitated yet another password change. Such is life as we now know it, and such are these poems.

 

 

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer, reviewer

 

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Poetry Book Review: Litany of Flights

 

In the new book of poems Litany of Flights by Laura Reece Hogan, which Paraclete Press kindly sent me to review, biblical references take flight in the lyrical voices of Saint Theresa, Saint John of the Cross, and others. Occasionally, though, the luscious lines leave me behind, uncertain of the poet’s intent. But since this slender volume won first place in the initial Paraclete Poetry Prize competition, I suggest your first reading of Litany of Flights remains open to flight, untethered from “understanding” and ready to experience the imagery, musicality, and emotions of the poems. (Trust me! It's worth it.)

 

Be prepared, too, to adore. In the poem “On Adoring You,” for instance, place yourself into this scene where:

 

“In dark cords of night you weave for me

a cocoon of yourself. Splinters for silk,

thorns your thread, a love poured, an emptied

truth. I drink, in stripped unknowing. I long

to emerge winged, a bloom from black earth,

for love is stronger than death.”

 

That particular poem came from the first section, “Emerge Winged,” as does the “Preaching of the Birds.”

 

“Yesterday on the feast of St. Francis, I thought – if he were here,

preaching to the birds, wrapped in his tunic of everyday, his holy knees

 

would sink to my dying grass, one hand pressed to the rough breast

of Sister earth, one lifted skyward in benediction of all flight.”

 

In section II. “Loft the Bones,” we find a “Movable Feast” with concluding lines that help to inform us more fully about the poems before and after:

 

“… I want to give you all the bowls of fragrant

prayers, all the fingers clasped in thanksgiving, all

the vowels of praise    ascending, all the joy in the

 

halls of light, and also in the halls of darkness, among

the little sparrows gazing so faithfully at your cloak of cloud.

I want to write my life     on a sheet of linen paper

 

spill all the notes of my love, from first dawn to dawnless day,

the pounding lament, the soaring victory, the hushed longing

and give it to you.

 

But you have already given it all to me.”

 

Also in section II. we have “One Handful with Tranquility” and these lines with which most of us can identify:

 

“This is mercy, this forgetting of the winter, the drought, the fire, and

the hunger’ the shuddering deep of the sigh, a time to release, a time

 

to love, come what may. This is mercy, this forgetting to remember,

the remembering to forget all except now, this present, this presence.”

 

Section III. further informs us as we “Scale This Light,” giving by the poem “Morning Star”:

 

“An exhale, then movement,

the water slides beneath. We

stay up all night looking for the stars,

less cosmic compass than pinpricks

in the heart, prophets linking arms

with apostles, a body.”

 

In “Fusion,” we find the ultimate Light scaled in this uplifting lines:

 

“In Dali’s cosmic dream, Christ

blazes as the nucleus of the universe,

a moment which bears all,

 

scintillating atoms caught under

the brush, a death reversed by creator.

Gaze on him, resplendent, join

 

these your atoms to his, and ignite.”

 

 

Reviewed by Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer

 

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Shadow Light by Denise Low

Poet and poetry instructor Denise Low has pared words down to their essence in Shadow Light, an award-winning collection from Red Mountain Press, which she kindly sent me to review.

These highly compressed poems begin with “Eyes,” whose lines baffled me at first reading and demanded a closer look. Having experienced blue circles around lights before cataract surgery, my eyes soon focused on:

“A fourth circle of Paradise - ultra-violets
- opens to hummingbirds - cataract patients.”

[Note: On the actual pages, no dashes occur in the typesetting but spaces, which my blog program removes with confusion ensuing, thus my insertion of the occasional dash.]

Even poems which seem clear at first reading require another look to see the deeper subject at play. For instance, in the playful but thought-provoking poem “Ceilings:”

“I look up just as the Louvre’s ceiling Icarus
falls from his father’s arms forward
painted wings behind him.
He plummets into
my gravity-squared
marble floor tile.”

The same poem also gives us a glimpse of the poet's skill in handling metaphor and descriptive detail, for example:

“Chandeliers dangling are cocktail glasses brimming effervescence.”

In the title poem, “Shadow Light,” we see how a “Birch forest shapes ragged darkness.” Then:

“Past shadows, where light glimmers
its celestial yellow, chiaroscuro,
my dead sister appears, back lit….”

When the following words appear, however, we can’t be sure if the living poet or deceased relative says:

“Don’t you know you are in Heaven?”

Perhaps, both give voice to those words.

An intriguing voice of Native America especially appeals to me. For example, in “Naming Willis Bird,” poetic lines call on each aspect of the Winds:

“Winds of the South: Here is Bird. Treat him well.
Winds of the South: You are good for my aching bones.”

And,

“West Winds: This is the direction of sunset and darkness.
You balance the sunrise. I know you as the place of dreams.”

In “Chicory Afternoon,” the poet speaks of a porcupine as “a nimble fat man’s shadow,” and in “Where the Dead Go:”

“Snow petals ghost
the northern wind.”

The last poem, “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County,” invites or returns us to ancestral abodes where:

“The lead man lifts his black hat and calls from the center.

I wait for the tail-end of the man-woman procession. Lead women
are shell shakers. Double-time steps rustle turtle-shell rattled tied to
shins.

Men sing and sing loud. Women step-step hard. The inner circle
might turn sideways to the fire.

My grandfather and grandmother lived on Lenape land near this
spot. Their footprints remain in the ground.”

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2018, poet-writer, reviewer

Shadow Light, paperback

Almost Entirely: a book review

In this age of cynicism and, often, fury, Jennifer Wallace lifts us from doubt and despair into spiritual insight and buoyancy in her new book of poems Almost Entirely published by Paraclete Press, who kindly sent me a copy to review.

Take, for example, the poem “When The Wing Gives Way,” in which the poet, like most of us, is getting too accustomed to death:

“I want to be more ready than I am today.
Ready to let what is left lift me, draw me into meanings
that will shatter me more than this.”

And consider her response to doubt in the poem by that name, which opens with these lines:

“I look at it this way: either you exist or you don’t. I don’t think –
in your case – there’s an in-between a ‘sort of’ God….”

And ends with the light touch of humor found in some of the poems:

“the same one who invented oxygen invented doubt and I guess
that sort of variety keeps things moving, which you are a fan of.
No doubt about that.”

In “Day of Faith,” the poet reminds us:

“Most of us believe in something:
the garden, a star, the scrape
of the stone rolling back….

Then asks:

“What is death but the truth of incompleteness?
An unpicked pear mottles in the grass.
The well fills and unfills.
One early sparrow can’t help but sing.”

As I read through the book, I marked it up – underlining exquisite phrases and putting an asterisk beside favorite poems such as “Atonement,” which begins with the “I” of the poem, starting a small fire and placing:

“On top of the stones, a small pile of messages
written on rice paper and folded into thumb-sized
packets, each with its own label: Fear, Guilt, Anger.”

In this act of confession:

“Righteousness was the first to go, its message
curled and crumpled, the dark ink dissolved to smoke
then drifted a little in the biting breeze.

My disappearing sins warmed me first
before reuniting with everything.”

And that’s what this book does well: reunites us - with God, each other, and our amusing selves.

Mary Sayler, ©2018, reviewer and poet-author

Almost Entirely, paperback



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Long to Love and Memory: Poetry by John B. Tabb

The lovely, rhythmic poetry of Rev. John B. Tabb may have been written in the 19th century, but with timeless beauty and refreshing brevity, it transports us now into a keener awareness of God, nature, and ourselves.

For instance, in the very first poem of the new collection Long to Love and Memory, which Editor E.L. Core and Ex Fontibus kindly sent me to review, the poet writes “To a Songster,” thereby crooning the criteria for his own poetic voice:

“O little bird, I’d be
A Poet like to thee,
Singing my native song –
Brief to the ear, but long
To Love and Memory.”

Often writing in quatrains with an a/b/a/b or a/b/b/a (appropriately "Abba") pattern of rhymes, the poet did not refrain from looking at human nature and himself in all honesty. For example, consider “The Stranger.”

“He entered; but the mask he wore
Concealed his face from me.
Still, something I had seen before
He brought to memory.

“'Who art thou? What thy rank, thy name?’
I questioned with surprise;
‘Thyself,' the laughing answer came,
‘As seen of others’ eyes’.”

And take a look at “An Influence.”

“I see thee – heaven’s unclouded face
A vacancy around thee made,
Its sunshine a subservient grace
Thy lovelier light to shade.

I feel thee, as the billows feel
A river freshening the brine;
A life’s libation poured to heal
The bitterness of mine.”

God’s creation has a healing effect on the poet, and, therefore, on us, the readers.

Again and again, Fr. Tabb’s insightful verses give us an accurate picture of how human nature inhabits (but, hopefully, does not inhibit!) both the natural and spiritual worlds. Mostly, though, the poems encourage us to see through the poet’s lenses of faith.

Ironically, Rev. Tabb lost his physical eyesight before his death, but in my studies of the works of Christian poets, I’ve found none more capable of seeing himself and God’s hand so clearly. Look, for instance, at this “Song.”

“Fade not yet, O summer day,
For my love hath answered yea;
Keep us from the coming night,
Lest our blossom suffer blight.

Fear thou not; if love be true,
Closer will it cleave to you.
‘Tis the darkened hours that prove
Faith or faithlessness in love.”

Since I’m writing this while taking a break from the intensive preparations needed before a Cat 5 hurricane arrives in Florida, this exquisitely wrought collection has given me the opportunity to refresh myself again with Rev. Tabb’s poems and wait out the storm with a timely boost in faith.

As countless other people also experience storms, floods, earthquakes, and their aftermaths, Fr. Tabb’s poem “Evolution” will surely bring comfort and relief.

“Out of the dusk a shadow,
Then, a spark;
Out of the cloud a silence,
Then, a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
Then, a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
Life again.”

Mary Sayler, ©2017, placed 30 books in all genres with Christian and educational publishers before self-publishing her new book, What the Bible Says About Love, which she hopes and prays will be her first in a series of topical Bible research and prayer-a-phrases.

Long to Love and Memory, paperback



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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 Early Poetry of Charles Wright

By the time I discovered the poetry of Charles Wright, his work had received prestigious awards, but not the Pulitzer, which I thoroughly expected him to win, and he did. Since then, I’ve continued to follow but not study his poems beyond my own ponderings. So when I learned of The Early Poetry of Charles Wright: A Companion, 1960-1990 written by English professor Robert D. Denham, I eagerly requested a review copy, which the publisher, McFarland, kindly sent.

As the author said in the Introduction, “Each of Wright’s poems can be read as a discrete work, but each is also part of an expansive quest.”

Sometimes this quest focuses on the poet’s life, sometimes on a fitting form, sometimes on spiritual questioning. In lesser hands, such aims might make for self-absorbed writing that doesn’t connect well with readers, but Wright’s acute powers of observation and fresh phraseology connect with us on an artistic, spiritual, and intellectual level. At times, though, the poet’s subject matter can be elusive and exclusive, so I welcomed Denham’s knowledge of poems I’d enjoyed, admired, but not necessarily understood!

Again in the Introduction, the author explained: “In the present book the notes that accompany most of the poems follow the usual conventions of annotation. They identify Wright’s sources (he is a comparatively allusive poet), along with people, places, things, and events that might not be immediately obvious. They also point to perceived influences, parallels to other poets, biographical details, historical explanation, and other kinds of supplementary and expository information, and they translate the occasional foreign word and phrase, ordinarily Italian.” Yeah!

To take full advantage of Professor Denham’s explications of the poems, you do well to have a copy of Wright’s two trilogies alongside, so you can see what’s going on that you might have missed (as I did) when reading Country Music: Selected Early Poems and The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990.

In summarizing Country Music, for example, the author provides a chart to point out the “Condensed form; process of squeezing down; the pilgrimage moves upward.” Also on the chart, we see that Hard Freight deals with the past in a “book of disparate individual lyrics” with “...narrative structure,” while Bloodlines focuses on the present in a “book of sequences” with both imagistic and narrative tone and structure. Addressing the future, China Trace has “movement toward a spiritual hope” in a “forty-six part poem beginning in childhood and ending in the constellation of fixed stars.”

The World of the Ten Thousand Things follows a past, present, and future timeline, too, in each of the books with The Southern Cross focusing on large concepts in the past. The Other Side of the River brings narrative-based poems into today, while Zone Journals and Xionia are concerned with what’s to come.

To give us further grounding, Professor Denham includes quotes from Wright himself. For example, in discussing “The New Poem” from the first trilogy, Wright defined that poem as “a reaction… to the idea that everything in the sixties was going to be different and make our lives different and was going to change everything.”

In “Spider Crystal Ascension,” Wright wanted to “compress the language and the thought to such a point that it stops being small and starts to enlarge…. Which is to say, rather than writing a lot to get larger and larger, you write less and less.”

References to poets, painters, and even post cards occur in the second trilogy. For example, in “Composition in Grey and Pink,” Denham says, “The instruction that Wright gave himself for this poem was to produce a watercolor in words.” How did that go?

"The souls of the day’s dead fly up like birds, big sister,
The sky shutters and casts loose.
And faster than stars the body goes to the earth.

Heat hangs like a mist from the trees.
Butterflies pump through the banked fires of late afternoon.
The rose continues its sure rise to the self."

In my opinion, that watercolor in words went amazingly well.

For “October,” Wright just wanted to write a seasonal poem, and for “Driving through Tennessee,” we learn that “Wright’s instruction to himself was ‘to write a poem that was basically commentary’.”

"In the moonlight’s fall, and Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr
and St. Paul of the Sword…

– I am their music"

Besides the mood music and gorgeous lines, what interests and surprises me is how Wright sets goals and guidelines for his frequent experiments with poetry! If the average poet were to say, "I'm gonna write a commentary in a poem," the lines would most likely come out as stiff as brocade with none of the beauty. Besides, who even thinks of writing a poem just to see if you can get a verb on every line as Wright does in “California Spring”?

Are you starting to think what I'm thinking? Not only is this a writer of absolutely beautiful poetry but a poet who lives in the poem.

His poem “Ars Poetica” says it well:

"I like it because I’m better here than I am there,

Surrounded by fetishes and figures of speech:
Dog’s tooth and whale’s tooth, my father’s shoe, the dead weight
Of winter, the inarticulation of joy . . .

The spirits are everywhere.

and once I have called them down from the sky, and spinning and
dancing in the palm of my hand,
What will it satisfy?
I’ll still have

The voices rising out of the ground,
The fallen star my blood feeds,
this business I waste my heart on.

And nothing stops that."


Oh, thank God, Charles. Thank God.


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer, has authored many traditionally published books in all genres, including poetry.


The Early Poems of Charles Wright, paperback


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