Praying with poetry

Regardless of your religious background, you’ve most likely heard of the famous trio: Poets, Prophets, and Saints, but after Wipf & Stock (Resource Publications) sent me a review copy of Digging for God: Praying with Poetry by Anne M. Higgins, I’d like to revise that big 3 to Poets, Prophets, and Pray-ers – the latter of whom can be almost anyone, saintly or not.

Line drawings by Maureen Beitman illustrate the four sections: Eden, Solomon, Gethsemane, and Revelation – each of which has the format of a poem followed by suggestions for prayer or meditation. For example, the opening “Tribute Poem” begins with “Praise for late sleeping day,/ waking up without alarm.” Then, as you turn the page, you’re asked to “Name five events, situations, or experiences that you appreciate” with special emphasis on “the ordinary and undramatic ones” and “write a poem of praise to God for them.” Since the rest of the page is blank, you immediately have a place to respond.

Most likely, though, you came here for some kind of discussion about poetry, so let’s talk about the poems in this book. A quick glimpse might supply such adjectives as “light and lovely” or “nice!” – especially since the lines actually look light and the layout nice. But consider the first few lines in the “Second Antiphon in the Style of Hildegard.”

O You who squeeze the wind
until she howls,
who wring the rain until
she gushes

Marvelous metaphors! Yes? So, what do you think comes next? Since this is a Daughter of Charity writing, would you expect this?

O You who squeeze the wind
until she howls,
who wring the rain until
she gushes,
send electric waves
rushing through the cord
to jolt the vacuum cleaner
to roaring life.
I pray your power
moving in the homeliest of things.

The poem goes on to list a few, and then the next page invites you to “List five objects in your everyday life that you would call ‘the homeliest things.’/ What gift does each of them have for you?”

Although I had no intentions of interacting right then as I’m busy trying to give you an objective review, I suddenly got subjective with my list:

• Footstool to up-put and rest my achy feet
• Cheese slicer to keep from having too much of a good thing
• Child’s step-stool to stretch and reach beyond the moment
• Fresh sheets that smell only of fresh air
• A lamp to read this and spotlight the stack of poetry books and Bibles close beside me, waiting for reading and review

Many of the poems by Anne Higgins deftly catalog what she sees. For instance, in “Wintering on St. Mary’s Mountain,” we join the poet in viewing a winter-browned mountain where “Owls and woodpeckers/ skim the gravestones –/ buttons on her broad brown coat.”

The poems do not rely on sightedness only, though, but call us to “Go Out to the Woods and Feel the Tree Bark,” joining the poet in experiencing a “Tree whose name I do not know,/ wearing your cable knit sweater,/ gnarled, snarling.”

In the section, “Solomon,” we experience sounds, too, or lack thereof, in “The Roofless Church, New Harmony, Indiana,” with “Silence, brown as earth,/ we describe/ by making walls around it/ and describing / the walls” as an artist might draw negative space, rather than the object. And, in “Gethsemane,” we become “The Rich Young Man,” who walks away from Jesus, saying “…to the disciple at the doorway,/ ‘Excuse me -/ I really must go’.”

The next section, “Golgotha,” opens with the title poem where the “I” of the poem wonders “How come the weeds are still green/ when the grass is brown with drought?” Conversely, the last poem in the last section, “Revelation,” gives us a “Gardner’s Magnificat” where “My heart shudders in God’s loamy breath,/ and I stand silent before my flourishing garden,/ for God has called his love for me/ through the sound of the Wood Thrush,/ through sunlight and shadow on Iris and Peony./ God shines in the leathery purple Ajuga leaves,/ startles me with feathery Astilbe/ I thought long lost to me.”

Whether the invasive Ajuga covers the ground or the Astilbe plant flowers like bright-colored feathers, nothing in this little book seems lost or wasted on readers apt to wonder, ponder, and dig.


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


Digging for God: Praying with Poetry, paperback



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Searching for What is Not There

When I interviewed Martin Willitts Jr. a few years ago, we discussed how poetry editors are people too. Now, reading the review copy of his poetry book, Searching for What is Not There published by Hiraeth Press, I realized what an accomplished poet he is, and how I’m already looking forward to re-reading this slender volume of verse.

Addressing universal themes of life, death, love, and loss, the book opens with the title poem, which gives us entry into exquisite poetry that often uses nature as a metaphor or means of explaining what cannot be explained: “Looking into a lake, things are elsewhere, off/ center as love when it first enters and leaves.”

In “How I Know Things Are Coming Back,” we get a glimpse of lupines, peonies, columbines, and the bloom of humor as the poet admits: “My garden is too small for my ambitions./ I have to work tight, constricted,/ composing haiku of underlying colors.” And in “The Cricket,” that tiny critter “preaches in song” as the poet sings, too, “under an open window of moonlight” where “The night hears me./ It knows my bamboo-flute heart. It knows/ the shortening seasons.”

As each of us approaches our own succession of losses, we also reach our moments of “Letting Go” where the poem by that name reminds us: “The wildness is everywhere – old branches/ break off in soft winds like loose teeth;/ rocks break free of the ground where they have been/ longer than memory; rivers are changing the ground around them.” Inviting us into this communal experience, the poet asks: “How can this continue, you may wonder./ Put the oars into your boat and see where you go.”

Yet another inviting poem asks by way of title, “What Will Happen If We Pull Down the Empty Sky,” then winsomely warns: “Dreams would crash on our heads,/ all those prayers we felt went nowhere/ would fall on us as meteorites.”

Even in the seriousness of loss, levity lifts and coaxes us, too, to begin “Singing in the Apron of Stars.” Having gone before us, the poet says, “I was liberated, for even a moment,/ to do what my heart knew instinctually right,/ and I was doing what I should be doing./ I was clipping the hedges with hymns.”

Nevertheless, euphoria and certainty do not last, and occasionally we might find ourselves, as the poet did, “Three Hours Before New Years and Counting” – even though “I knew that New Years Day was off to a bad start/ when snow began to fall inside of my closet, geese flew from the coat hangers,/ and someone tobogganed out of the shoe boxes.”

Real or imagined, such unexpected moments lead us lightly toward the closing poem commemorating “Things We Find Instead of Other Things.” But then, “That is the problem with seeking./ Sometimes, we do not find what we want to find,/ and we find other things instead.” Even so, “There is always something in the nothingness./ Wild winds thin out into smells from apple blossoms,” where, like the poet, “I am always wondering/ what is just beyond.”

© 2014, Mary Sayler

Searching for What is Not There, paperback



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Review: Songs from a Wild Place by Jason Kirkey

In Songs from a Wild Place, poet Jason Kirkey dedicates the book “To anyone who ever thought they could change the world with their art” then proceeds to the first poem “Silence” where “this life is not yet spoken;/ it cannot hear itself/ or the melody around it/ which sings of all the/ unbidden lyrics/ raging in its heart.”

Not rage, however, but wonder asks “Who is the Poet? Who is the Pen?” in a poem by that title where “Anything can happen in the bare lines/ stretched before us” as we keep on “listening and faithfully writing what we hear.”

Seeking and finding inspiration “Near the center of a land that/ I have known,” the poem “Self Portrait” proclaims our acceptance in a vastness where “I could still claim,/ if nothing else,/ this breathing as my own.”

And so as we, like the poet, give ourselves over to poetry and that “Wonder at the Edge of Morning,” we begin to “emerge from the dark,/ the invisible world slipping from our shoulders” to find “waking is an art of wonder;/ the mastery in taking the first/ pure note of the day, and stretching/ it across the measure of all the hours” as each day we awaken to new life, new resources of time and energy, new opportunities, new hopes and visions and songs.

“When Lightning Strikes the Heart,” however, “there is no telling what/ dark storm will take…” us, “turning us toward the/ life we have avoided.” But then, isn’t that the risk we take as poets and artists in search of honesty and truths in need of telling?

As a poet and editor-publisher of Hiraeth Press, Jason Kirkey understands the cost of creativity as revealed in “Canto III: Descent to Hades,” which begins with the haunting line, “There will be no sky tonight.” Later the poem cautions, “if you are afraid then turn your eyes/ not away, but towards –/ compassion is the heart of tension.” And, in “Canto IV: Contradiction, Beauty,” the poem exhorts us with these words, “If you have healed yourself/ then you must heal the world.”

Nevertheless, the “Song of the Broken” cautions us about our “need/ to keep plunging in desperate/ prayer into the dark waters” of our wounds where “the scars will not heal – / shouldn’t,/ they’re your voice and honor,/ the ground from which you rose.”

This openness to the poem, this vulnerability to our art continues in “The Mountain of No-Self,” asking, “What faith can we find in the always changing world?/ What safety? What presence? None without risk!/ Abandon safety. Come dance on the mountains.”

Despite the risks and chancy moments when, as poets or artists, we occasionally veer too near the edge of despair, “July Leaves” leaves us with the initial need for silence – that quiet space in which to process our lives and art, saying, “If you would speak, then meditate/…following the breath to its center/ and there to find the waiting pearl of some/ invisible and luminous strand that/ doesn’t want your name.”

In a literary terrain where poets and writers are constantly told to market themselves and establish a brand, Songs from a Wild Place has none of that. Instead, this highly recommend book ends with a call to see a large view of ourselves and the work we’ve been given, leaving us with this word: “If you would meditate, then speak;/ if you would speak then know that the sound/ of your breathing passed through the pure/ silence of your body, and all the music that follows/ is the freedom that we were born for./ The air is already rushing in to fill you./ What is the beauty that you will sing?”

© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


Songs from a Wild Place, paperback



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