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



…

Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse

In Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse, award-winning poet and college professor William Woolfitt takes us into the life of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916)– a Christian saint and martyr I might never have heard about were it not for the review copy Paraclete Press kindly sent me. And, if it were not for my welcoming almost any book of poems produced by Paraclete, I might never have become familiar with the exquisite work of William Woolfitt.

Throughout this biography in verse, the “I” of each poem comes to life in Woolfitt, the poems, and us as though we’re inside Charles’ head, experiencing, observing, sensing, enduring.

In the opening poem, for example, Woolfitt envisions the very young Charles as seeing “My Father as Weather Formation” – a man who adversely affects those around him, and “Then his whims enslave him. He stuffs his valise/ with jars and papers, flees to the city….” Nevertheless, memories of the absent parent linger in a “Man of fidgets/ and glances, soon to appear in the clouds as beasts/ for me to name, and fall on his woods like snow.”

Subsequently, in “My Mother as Harp Seal, as Sacristan,” we learn that young Charles and his mother “had knelt that morning/ to give daisies and asters, to kiss the feet/ of the pale, poor eggshell man who hung/ on the church wall, his weight webbing/ cracks through the plaster….”

Orphaned by school age, the boy arrived in “The House of Bones,” where “Grandfather filled in as my father./ We lived in a repository of Roman coins,/ pinned beetles, leather-bound books/ that crumbled if touched” and where an assortment of visiting “officers, scholars, priests” admired the grandfather’s “cases of animal skulls.”

Within those first few insightful poems, Woolfitt gives us a clear picture of an other-than-normal childhood, which, the “Chronology” in the back of the book tells us eventually led to “a reputation for gluttony, drunkenness, and seducing women.”

Before his thirtieth birthday, however, the well-to-do Charles became aware of “The Pangs of Wanting” where he longed to “explore unmapped lands; meditate on deep truths;/ argue with shrewd, brilliant men; make love to a woman/ versed in the pieties of faith and the pleasures of the earth;/ try celibacy; father able sons….” However, Charles gave his soldier’s uniform and other costumes to his nephews to “serve as their playthings.” Then, “I deliver my body to the church….”

Adventures and hardships continuing, Charles served as the gardener of a convent in Nazareth where, according to the “Chronology,” in 1897, “The mother superior encourages him to become a priest….”

In another beautiful biographical poem, “Dust and Oil,” Woolfitt gives us a glimpse of that ordination, which occurred in 1901 in Viviers, France:

“Like a spruce hit by wind and lightning,
the bishop sways, crackles before me.
He charges me with the volts of his hands

clamped on my head, the singe of peace
he kisses to my brow….”

Discarding a hermit’s life that lives “as dust that drifts into corners, cracks,/ ditches and ruts,” the young priest then began to wear a robe with a “crimson heart over my breast./ May I take the sacraments to the heart/ of the Sahara, the unknown, the uttermost;/ where there are no priests, may I offer/ fraternal love to the soldiers of France,/ may I prepare a feast for peasants,// nomads, and slaves.”

In 1902 Algeria, “For Three Hundred Francs,” the poem by that title tells us, “I bought a slave boy this morning,” while the next poem “We Hide Our Faces from the Wind” clarifies that, as soon as some hoped-for funds arrived, “I will ransom more slaves.”

Moving among the nomadic Tuareg in Hoggar, Algeria, Charles began to learn the language, write a Tuareg dictionary, and live as the Tuareg people did. In “Consider the Ant,” for example, he would “sometimes find miracles/ of food: acacia pods I can pound into edible meal,” and “once, a snarl of bees/ flitting from the mouth of a dead jackal,// and inside the carcass’s dark cave, enough honey,/ sweet and glistening, to fill the bowl of my hands.”

In one highly visual narrative after another, Woolfitt presents his totally credible persona of Charles through diverse conditions until finally, during a 1916 uprising, “Someone Knocks” and “my neighbors" – raiders – "slam me against/ the wall ransack my little fort unbind/ and fling/ my Tuareg dictionary/ my sheaves of Tuareg poetry/” and “tear the cross the heart from my robe….” To end those final moments and this highly recommended book, William Woolfitt enables us to “feel the breath and the burn/ as my lips form the word I choose/ and my pages scatter in the wind.”

Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-author and reviewer



Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse, French fold 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