A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sad stuff and somewhat repetitive in theme, but Housman is a great poet, and there are some real gems here.

I love an anecdote from Lenten Lands, the autobiography of Douglas Gresham. Gresham's mother, Joy Davidman Gresham, was the American poet who became Lewis's wife.

One day, the 14-year-old Douglas walked into the living room, and there were his mother and Lewis, both with tears running down their cheeks. Wondering what was wrong, Douglas asked, "What's the matter?"

Lewis replied, "Nothing's wrong, Doug. We're reading the poems of A. E. Housman and they always do this to us."

View all my reviews

Hopkins: Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed both the poems and the journals. The journals show that Hopkins was a detailed observer of nature, of words, of people. He was fascinated by quirks of all kinds--quirky words, quirky accents, quirky trees, quirky cloud formations . . . To Hopkins, every thing, every single object in nature, had a unique place in God's design and a unique role in showing His glory. Every thing "selves." That is, every thing points to God just by being what it is. This is reflected in his poem "God's Grandeur":

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

I love those last two lines--a contrast between the infinite variety of nature and the changelessness of God. The last line, abruptly short, shows that after considering these things, the poet is speechless.

Of course, Hopkins' poetry is amazing. I have been familiar with some of his poems since college, but this book introduced me to a lot of new ones. I also read "The Wreck of the Deutschland" in full for the first time. This poem especially shows Hopkins' complex style, in which he uses original rhythms and original words. Hopkins' style reflects the inifluence of Anglo-Saxon poetry--a lot of alliteration, and an attention to not the number of total syllables in a line, but the number of stressed syllables. The syntax is frequently convoluted. It takes some work for the reader, but it is very rewarding, especially when he points us to the glory of God. For one more taste of his style, here's the last part of "The Wreck of the Deutschland":

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness
of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our heart's charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts'
chivalry's throng's Lord.

View all my reviews

Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation by Luci Shaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful collection. In the midst of the stress of the holidays, I was thankful to have a few moments to read these poems, which rekindled a sense of awe at the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Luci Shaw has a way of making truths that I’ve always known come alive to me in a new way. For example, I love "Mary's Song" for its portrayal of Mary's quiet wonder at her Baby, who she knew was God Himself:

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest . . .
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.

His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by dove’s voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

And “Mary’s Song” is typical of the poems in this collection. Not every one of the poems were as moving, but some, like this one, are truly marvelous.

Some of my other favorites were “The Meaning of White Oaks,” “One,” “A Blessing for the New Baby,” “Bluff Edge, Whidby Island,” “The Partaking.”

For me, the most moving poem in this book was one near the end entitled “Revolutionary.” It's a powerful expression of the injustice that Christ endured, and the wonder of the love He showed us by going to the cross.

Do you
wince when you hear his name
made vanity?

What if you were not so safe
sheltered, circled by love
and tradition? What if
the world shouted at you?
Could you take the string of
hoarse words -- glutton, wino,
devil, crazy man, agitator, bastard,
nigger-lover, rebel --
and hang the grimy ornament
around your neck
and answer love?

See the sharp stones poised
against your head! Even
your dear friend
couples your name with curses
(“By God! I know not God!”).
The obscene affirmation
of infidelity
echoes, insistent
from a henhouse roof.

Then, Slap! Spit! The whip,
the thorn. The gravel
grinds your fallen knees
under a whole world’s weight
until the hammering home
of all your virtue
stakes you, stranded,
halfway between hilltop
and heaven (neither will
have you).

And will you whisper forgive?

Poems like these leave me speechless.

I hope to read this book again, along with more of Shaw’s books.

Pruning Burning Bushes by Sarah M. Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book I’ve read by faculty/staff at Ashland University, the others being two by Stephen Haven (The River Lock and The Last Sacred Place in North America) and one by Peter Campion (The Lions). Each of these books has pushed my literary horizons, and I’ve enjoyed them.

Pruning Burning Bushes is a beautiful book, and of the four Ashland books I’ve read, it’s the one that I personally connected with most. I was reminded in some ways of the poetry of Luci Shaw and Linda Pastan, two other poets whose work I’ve enjoyed.

In these poems, Wells takes snapshots of her everyday experiences—-at the kitchen table, in the garden, at the playground—-and illuminates the unexpected significance of these moments. One of the best examples is her poem “Cascade Valley,” which you can read here. Since I have three daughters who I love to take hiking, this poem resonated in me.

Another aspect of Wells’ poetry that I appreciated is her use of sensory imagery. She knows how to awaken the imagination through the senses. For just one example, these lines from “Pancakes” make my mouth water and bring back memories of camping when I was a kid:

Grandpa stacked them seven high
with a dab of butter, all-you-can-eat
after a Friday night sleepover.
I cut the circles into even squares, drizzled
maple syrup on each spongy morsel,
soaked up sugar in each pore like memory.
I was ready to flip the cakes before the bubbles
popped—they never cooked fast enough—

but campground pancakes baked quick
and burnt easy over the fire pit. The recipe
for simplicity: add milk, shake and pour
out the weekend hitched to a pick-up truck.
We percolated coffee from rain
off the camper’s canopy,
burned all that sucrose on our bicycles
beneath the sugar maples.

She also knows how to use metaphor. Another of my favorites was “The Antique Rocking Chair,” a poem that describes the process of meticulous restoration—-and not just the restoration of a chair.

Away goes the ache of discoloration,
oil dissolved, original grains exposed.
Every crevice is cleansed, each abrasion

doctored with twine between the grooves,
brass-bristled brushes in each recess.
He sands away the raised grain, removes

the marks in the concave seat. With glue
that’s slow to set, the seat and arms are raised
and then the spindles and splat. It’s almost new,

the way the old has been removed. The carpenter
knows the chair won’t last without stain
and picks a distinguishing shade to bear the wear

of another century. It is set apart, protected
with three coats of clear wood finish. The rocker
holds the woodworker: it is finished.

And there is a lot more to this book. This is a thoughtful collection of poetry, and I hope to read more of Wells’s work in the future.

View all my reviews

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really like the poetry of Billy Collins. It’s whimsical, fun, and accessible. Collins writes to make us laugh, to make us reflect, and to help us simply enjoy being human beings.

Many of these poems left me with a smile on my face. The poems are imaginative, occasionally sad, and often hilarious. There’s even a poem that’s intentionally lousy—his “Paradelle for Susan.” Although three or four of the poems are too crass for me, I really enjoyed this book overall. Here were a few of my favorites:

• “Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...

• “Workshop”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

• “Introduction to Poetry”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

• “First Reader”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...

• “Winter Syntax”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...

• “The Rival Poet”: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5...

• "The History Teacher": http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org...

View all my reviews

The Last Sacred Place in North America by Stephen Haven
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this thoughtful book of poems, Stephen Haven explores what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century. Although we live in the space age, dominated by globalism, media, and technology, we have lost almost all sense of the sacred.

And yet, as Haven shows, we are still human beings. We are creatures who feel, who love, who grieve, and who remember. Haven demonstrates that even if modern man has lost his faith, he can’t get away from his humanity.

Some of Haven’s most poignant poems deal with the death of his father, an Anglican priest.

"I wanted to stay
A long while in the brake lights’ glow
But somewhere in an absence
Of underwriters and sacraments
One last time my father put on his stole.

Too young to receive
A child bared his head.
Then all the universe weighed in
For the altered touch of the priest."

My favorite poem in this book is “Last Light,” a poem based on George Inness’s painting Summer Landscape, 1894. Haven captures a sense of the simplicity of life in the late nineteenth century, before the World Wars, before the space age. And in this poem, Haven shows a longing for a paradisal world that he believes will never be here. The lines are beautiful and sad:

"Everything’s smeared with this one view: early September,
Late afternoon, the magenta of Man at home in his world.
Cattle fade in the gloam, no wild ass of a man, no hand ever
Raised against them. The peace that passes understanding
Throttles in a songbird’s throat. Toward the further horizon,
Three chords of color lighten finally to the speckled blue
And white of sky: dark bottom band, then blue-green grass,
Then the far field, distant trees, ceding to autumn and its tones.

. . .

No sign of rain, though still in the dark swath something takes
To ground, the black tilt of the mind, this rogue lush calm
Cohering, collapsing, imagined into being, till we know
That this is in us, necessary, superfluous, bearing through some
Wild dream, the Garden as it never was, and never again will be."




View all my reviews

Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998 by Linda Pastan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Linda Pastan is such a versatile poet. At times, her poetry is uplifting, encouraging, and simply lovely. But it can also be so sad that it breaks your heart.

There is no denying that her poetry is beautiful. I read that she revises her poems one hundred times, and I believe it, because these poems constantly astonish us in both imagery and in language. One example is “Proclamation at a Birth,” which is the first poem of hers that I ever came across, the poem that led me to buy this book. I first read this poem in my daily email from the Writer’s Almanac, and it stood out because of the way it captures a parent's joy as a new life comes into the world.

Let every tree
burst into blossom
whatever the season.
Let the snow melt
mild as milk
and the new rain wash
the gutters clean
of last year’s
prophecies.
Let the guns sweep out
their chambers
and the criminals doze
dreaming themselves
back to infancy.
Let the sailors throw
their crisp white caps
as high as they can
which like so many doves
will return to the ark
with lilacs.
Let the frogs turn
into princes,
the princes to frogs.
Let the madrigals,
let the musical croakings
begin.

In some ways, this poem is typical of her work. It’s deceptively simple, and it involves the changes that life brings us. But it also stands out from much of her other work in that it focuses on the beginning of a life, not on the end of one.

Pastan's poetry is dominated by the thought that life will come to an end. As it is in Keats’s late poems, the steady approach of death is always in the background of her poetry, even if not mentioned outright. This gives Pastan’s poems a quiet poignancy and a deep sense of loss. One way that Pastan expresses this quiet grief is through nature, as her poem “Autumn” demonstrates:

I want to mention
summer ending
without meaning the death
of somebody loved

or even the death
of the trees.
Today in the market
I heard a mother say

Look at the pumpkins,
it’s finally autumn!
And the child didn’t think
of the death of her mother

which is due before her own
but tasted the sound
of the words on her clumsy tongue:
pumpkin; autumn.

Let the eye enlarge
with all it beholds.
I want to celebrate
color, how one red leaf

flickers like a match
held to a dry branch,
and the whole world goes up
in orange and gold.

This use of nature as a symbol of change and impending loss gives Pastan’s work subtlety and power. Another way Pastan achieves these qualities is through her allusions. She makes herself various characters from mythology and Scripture, including Penelope and, most of all, Eve. Her many references to Eve and to Eden are fascinating, and they reflect Pastan’s meditations on many aspects of our human experience, including fate versus free will, relationships between men and women, and the problem of evil in our world. One example of the poet as Eve is a lovely sonnet entitled “Seasonal” from her sonnet sequence “The Imperfect Paradise.”

Which season is the loveliest of all?
Without a pause you smile and answer spring,
Thinking of Eden long before the fall.
I see green shrouds enclosing everything
And choose instead the chaos of the snow
Before God separated dark from light.
I hear the particles of matter blow
Through wintry landscapes on a wintry night.
You find the world a warm and charming place,
My Adam, you name everything in sight.
I find a garden of conspicuous waste –
The apple’s flesh is cold and hard and white.
Still, at your touch my house warms to the eaves
As autumn torches all the fragile leaves.

This mixture of beauty and sadness permeates her poems. And one thing I like about this volume in particular is that it captures thirty years of Pastan’s work, so it includes her thoughts on all stages of her life. There are poems about her girlhood, poems about her courtship and marriage, poems about becoming a mother and the complexities of parent-child relationships, poems about aging and losing parents, and, near the end of the book, the beautiful poem “Sometimes,” written from her perspective as a grandmother:

Sometimes

from the periphery
of the family
where I sit watching
my children and
my children’s children
in all their bright cacophony,

I seem to leave
my body--
plump effigy
of a woman, upright
on a chair--
and as I float
willingly away

toward the chill
silence of my own future,
their voices break
into the syllables
of strangers,
to whom
with this real hand
I wave goodbye.

Poems like this cause me to love this book. And yet as I finish it, I grieve that for Pastan, these fleeting moments of joy are all she has. As she looks ahead to the end, there is nothing more.

View all my reviews

The Angles of Light: New and Selected Poems by Luci Shaw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a collection of wonderful poetry by an outstanding Christian poet. Luci Shaw's poems in this volume are original and subtle, personal and profound, drawing on nature to show that for the Christian, the physical world is not neutral, but sacramental. Shaw reminds us that nature is a means for God to bless us and show us aspects of His glory and His grace. In particular, I love how Shaw uses light as a metaphor throughout the book to communicate the ideas of both enlightenment and beauty.

For me, these poems give a sense of wonder that the physical world can convey to us day by day if we will take the time to slow down and notice. In this way, even though Shaw's poetry is much more free in form, it reminds me of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Here's just a taste from one of my favorites in the book, "We know this to start with." This poem reminds us that we experience the wonder of this God-created, marvelous world through the five senses He gave us.

" . . . Somehow
without witchcraft or chicanery

we collect sounds and colors in a skyward
dish, like fruit in a bowl, and channel them
into verisimilitude--faces talking at us

from the tube's glass eye. Hallways of fog
enfold us in enigma. And then, the marvel of
window glass--how can anything be

hard enough to stop the hand and
hold its smudge while letting through this
soft light? The one wheat kernel that

breeds a thousand--a miracle of
loaves over and over again.
The stars, invisible in the blind day

revealed, thick as pollen, by the absence
of light."


View all my reviews

The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this long poem because C. S. Lewis loved it and because I'm simply fascinated by Anglo-Saxon history and culture. This poem is the partially historical, partially idealized story of King Alfred, the ninth-century Saxon king who defended his kingdom successfully against the Danes. (To this day, he's still the only English monarch known as "the Great.")

As someone who is familiar with English history but not an expert in it, I found the poem hard to follow in places (geography, historical references, etc.). I also found some of the slower passages tedious. (I should note that these are not Chesterton's faults as a writer, but mine as a reader.) But overall this is a good story that includes heroism, adventure, and the triumph of virtue. I also enjoyed how Chesterton, true to form, weaves a defense of Christianity (well, Catholicism) into the narrative.

I put only three stars because after having read it only once, I feel like I need to read it again to really let it get into my imagination so that I can savor it and enjoy it more.

As a postscript, this poem is the source of these famous lines:

"For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad."


View all my reviews

Entries by Wendell Berry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the last few months, the poetry of Wendell Berry caught my attention. But this summer, Wendell Berry has become one of my very favorite writers. I recently checked this book out at my local library, started reading, got hooked, and finished it in one day. It was a wonderful reading experience, more enjoyable than any book I've read for a long time. (And I'm glad I didn't come across his works till this year - I don't think I could have enjoyed Berry before I turned 30.) At times Berry gets a little preachy and political (and I should add that I certainly don't always agree with him), but overall, he is a profound, elegant writer who shows us through his craft much of what it means to be created in God's image, to be fully human, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to care for God's earth. There's so much to chew on here, and it's so elegantly written that I want to read this book through again and again.

View all my reviews