IN PASSING

During the services at St. Mary's Convent, Sewanee, yesterday, I was happy to hear the priest talk about The Arts as a way to connect with God, expanding that notion to include the art of poetry. I felt like adding to her remarks those made by Urban T. Holmes who said that when Anglicanism is at its best, its liturgy, its poetry, its music and its life can create a world of wonder in which it is very easy to fall in love with God. The presiding priest at St. Mary's also said that reading poetry and listening to music could inspire the same spiritual connection. So, following services, I went home and opened a book of poetry entitled In Passing by John Miller that I had received in the mail when I returned from our visit to Louisiana.

In Passing, Pinyon Publishing's newest publication, covers the lifework of Miller who has published poetry in a variety of journals, two full-length collections and several chapbooks. Many of these publications are compiled in this compelling collection of musings about love, survival, grief, history, and mortality, and Miller expresses his insights in a clear, definitive voice.

Miller's poems are highly accessible, and he's at his best in a section devoted to his father and their relationship entitled "Time and Time Again." I was moved by the intense current of ideas in "Where We'd Caught The Big Ones," as the poet follows his aging father on a fishing trip in Hawai'i "down to jagged lava, the promise/off its jut..." and the poignancy of the lines that expose the old man's vulnerability and the poet's desire to help him: "Balancing our way/over rough stone, uphill, toward the road,/I want to take his hand, offer/to carry all our gear, but do neither,/granting him his own slow pace..." This exact memory of a stark moment in the poet's life conveys the pain of observing mortality and will not fail to move readers with its expression of anguish.

The gem in In Passing is a poem entitled "Emily Dickinson," formerly published in The Southern Review, and a full excerpt of the second section in the poem will titillate devoted readers of the bard of Amherst whose poetry gained immortality in collections published after her death: "A burning bush, a blaze of light:/if such intensities thus spoke His will, /what was her worship as she waited/rapt by the stealthy glow aslant those hills/of frozen Amherst? When light faded, /when trance deepened to shadow in its dumb/unciphered pause, it was she who paid/absence its due and saw its kingdom come..." The emotional poise and power in this poem expresses a truth told in unmistakable clarity and is infused with deep personal radiance. I call it one of those "great poems."

A poem entitled "At Eventide" reminds me of Julian of Norwich's observation that we experience spiritual moments in our lifetime through both consolation and desolation. Miller creates an arresting picture of a woman in a Tampa Bay retirement home watching every evening from a fifth floor window for a man on the beach "...hunting shells or meditating/or both, she can never tell..." The appearance of the man and the moments of his activity in her inactive life seem to comfort her, and when he disappears into the darkness, she reflects: "...She sees beyond, a pyramid of lights/mirrored in the offshore calm. /A cruise ship anchored. There must be/voices, laughter, dance music, karaoke/on board, drowned for her by distance/and the ceaseless swell, /the curl and crash of waves into the night." This poem also reminds me of W.H. Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts," his poem about suffering in which he writes: "...The expensive delicate ship that must have seen/Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on..."

Publisher Gary Entminger touts that Miller's poems are easy to read quickly but they contain the depth to encourage readers to return for second readings. His remarks are on the mark—I read the volume in one sitting; however, this morning while listening to Perahia play and direct Mozart's piano concertos, I returned to them again and discovered deeper meaning and resilience in Miller's writings. Here is an original poet whose wisdom is strongly apparent throughout In Passing, but readers won't just read this collection "in passing!"

John Miller grew up in Hawai'i and earned his graduate degrees from Stanford University. He retired from Denison University and lives with his wife Ilse in a retirement community in Lexington, Virginia.

Order In Passing from Pinyon-Publishing, 23847 V 66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403

ILLUMINATE

Margaret Simon, one of my New Iberia, Louisiana friends, has chosen an apt title for a slender book of finely-crafted poems published by Border Press. The poems accompany the drawings of John Gibson, her father, who used a technical pen to execute arresting pictures in the tradition of pen and ink pointillism art.

Following a church service at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana last year, Margaret told me that she had reviewed a collection of her father’s Christmas cards she had received through the years and conceived the idea of deepening her connection with her father by writing poems to express the religious verses he used to accompany the Christmas card drawings. The result is Illuminate, a book in which each poem is a “harmony creating a vision of love,” as Margaret writes in the first poem she conceived about her father’s art. The poem was an exercise she completed during a writing project retreat with former Louisiana poet laureate Darrell Bourque.

The cover of Illuminate by John Gibson features a drawing derived from a photograph he took of a small church in Salzburg following an all-night snowfall. The drawing became the basis for the first Christmas card he “illuminated.” Eleven drawings in Illuminate reflect Gibson’s passion to capture spiritual mysteries in art using the technique of pen and ink pointillism. He does not use lines, and most of the picture elements are created with small dots made by a technical pen with a 0.05-mm point – images of angels, wise men, Mary, and a manger scene that inspired Margaret to write a poem entitled “The Pointillist.”

Margaret’s poems show her command of the writing craft in the range of poetry forms she uses to deliver the message derived from her father’s ink drawings, about which he says: “it is the darkest dark that reveals the brightest light. So it seems also in life.” I was drawn to a sonnet about trees entitled “Dance of the Trees” that is a tribute to Margaret’s father and resonates with rich sound and rhythm:

Dance of the Trees

Look at trees, think of God who came to bring us love.

I watch you watching trees,

I watch you watching those trees

outside your window in the loft.

If you could walk on the roof,

if you could walk out on that roof and touch them—

you could feel their hearts beating,

their hearts beating out the rhythm of the wind.

I watch you drawing the trees.

I watch you drawing those trees

in perfect chiaroscuro, shading just so,

just so they come alive and dance.

The trees dance in the moonlight

when you draw them.

When you draw them, God’s hand moves.

God’s hand is moving.

Illuminate is a small volume, but it radiates with light and inspiration, with religious and nature themes. It’s a unique Christmas gift that celebrates the passion and faith of two family members who teamed up to create an artistic gem.

Margaret Gibson Simon teaches gifted students in Iberia Parish, has published poems in the journal, The Aurorean, and wrote a chapter about teaching poetry to young children for Women on Poetry published by McFarland and Co., Inc. She’s also the author of a young readers’ novel, Blessen, published in April, 2012 by Border Press. Margaret has a Masters degree in Gifted Education and certification by the National Boards for Professional Teaching Standards. She lives on the Bayou Teche with her husband Jeff in New Iberia, Louisiana.

John Gibson retired from medicine in 1997 and has been doing pen and ink pointillism for many years. He has displayed his work in galleries in the Jackson, Mississippi metropolitan area since 2001 and received second place in the 2012 Annual Cedars Juried Art Exhibition. He credits the “environment within which he lives for providing him with creations of nature such as trees and foliage and the magical effects of light and shadow as subject for his ink drawings.” He lives with his wife Dot on a lake in Madison County, Mississippi.

Order Illuminate online or from Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee TN 37375.

WIRES OVER THE HOMEPLACE

If the arresting title of Pinyon Publishing’s latest poetry publication, Wires Over the Homeplace by Paul Dickey, doesn’t attract readers, the sharp black and red cover painting entitled “Bold Painting” by Ira Haber will certainly entice poetry lovers to look within. However, readers don’t have to read far for their interest to be captured by poems of energy and variety that introduce a poet who writes at the center of things.

Paul Dickey crosses the boundaries of space and time in the opening section of Wires Over the Homeplace, entitled “Frontier Ancestors,” in the poem by that name, “bearing the full baggage of history, stowing the ancient instruments/that no more predict the future” and moving on to “where the rivers part…” in a late 18^th century Pennsylvania frontier, then across the U.S. into the postmodern era. He transports readers into harsh places of the Midwest--at a public auction of the revered family farm and to a scene where “plump and skinny wives crow of granddaughters with money and day jobs in Milwaukee…” reaching out to every generation with his wry style conceived in democratic introspection.

My favorite section, entitled “A Knack to Losing Things,” shows Dickey’s ability to execute a bit of partner poetry in which he dialogues with the deceased American poet Elizabeth Bishop, author of “One Art.” He links himself with Bishop’s lines about significant personal losses with his own lines “What had been lost along the casual way/will not come back to me another day,/and to be frank, it often will not do/to keep a useful thing its use past due…” This “union in identity” carried out by many poets has been explicated in David Lehmann’s preface to The Best of American Poetry, 25^th Edition, in which Lehmann explains how poets often “take note of an ancestor, ally, or rival” and begin a dialogue with a deceased poet about a mutually-inspired subject.

Dickey’s philosophical inclination exerts itself in many of the poems included in “The Knack of Losing Things” section; e.g., his “A Thief We Barely Noticed,” a poem with succinct lines about the inevitable journey toward life’s end, penned in metaphors that speak of ordinary household events: “A thief is living with us/tearing threads of wallpaper, pulling threads from the carpet./Every night it is the same./Footprints wear the linoleum./Luster is stolen from the silverware…”

In the section “We Never Know,” Dickey confronts aging, writing poems that are so poignant they cannot be dismissed by those who have reached the evening of their lives; e.g., “A Retiree Ponders His Day,” in which Dickey ponders his “morning of many rooms” and likens his life to a phonograph needle, listening to the “scratches, hisses, the pops that even now sound like the many years of himself…” These metaphors are woven into poems of sustained power throughout the section and affirm Dickey’s poetic strength in illuminating ordinary objects and people so that readers easily connect with his vision.

Dickey belongs among the Best of American Poets, and Wires Over the Homeplace is a significant work of contemporary poetry – each poem in the volume is a polished gem. He adds another star to Pinyon’s galaxy of outstanding American poets. Dickey is a poetry and philosophy instructor in Omaha, Nebraska and has published poetry book reviews, poetry, fiction, plays, and creative non-fiction in over 100 journals. His recent books include They Say This is How Death Came Into the World and Liberal Limericks of 2012, a collection of humorous political poems.

Order Wires Over the Homeplace from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

INTO THIS WORLD

I went into the Barnes and Noble University Bookstore this morning and came out with a children’s book entitled Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made that I seriously thought about reviewing in this blog. However, readers were saved from my foisting the choice of a notable volume of juvenile wit on them by the arrival of the morning mail. A trip to the post office yielded more serious literature in the form of my favorite genre–a book of poetry, fresh from the press of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado.

Publisher Gary Entsminger has done it again–published the work of a prize-winning poet of unmistakable talent. Michael Miller’s Into This World rivals the latest blockbuster novel in terms of being a page turner–I read the 73-page volume in one sitting and closed the book with thoughts about Donald Hall’s evaluation of poetry: “Poems are not about anything because they are about everything.” Michael Miller’s work encompasses that everything–love, war, the natural world, death…ladybugs, bumblebees, dogs, polar bears…

Miller’s poems achieve the balance of darkness and light, of the intrepid heart pitted against a broken world, each poem rendered with grace and a sense of the invincible spirit of humans; e. g., “Private Bayless:” “Before the dark shoulders of mountains/setting forth on a night mission/With the wind’s breath/Blowing across his face, pricking him/With invisible needles of sand,/ He smells death in the air./ “The Taliban, the Taliban,” a voice/Gnaws at his mind and he prays/to leave Afghanistan alive, intact./Should a bullet sever his spinal cord, He will make love to his wife/With his eyes, blinking signals/For the acts he cannot perform.”

This is only one of the war poems that indicates the deftness with which Miller handles human woundedness, condensing emotions into short lyrical bursts in poems bearing the names and ranks of soldiers: “Private Wheeler,” “Corporal Bedford,” “Lance Corporal Webster”…and ending this section with the reflection about “Corporal Sayers:” “…He never saw the faces of the men he killed./The war is over,/The dead will not run across a ridgeline,/And he has returned,/Refusing to kill a spider.”

There is no artifice in this poet’s ruminations. A keen observer of human passion, he writes a spare poem about how a man “ignited from within brightens the night…singeing the grass/alarming the milkweed.” In the section entitled “Song of the Body,” Miller’s poetry sings in what I’d call wry rapture --songs containing the lyrics of an enduring married love that challenges the shallowness of post-modern promiscuity. He creates and recreates scenes of marital intimacy: “X. Their blue sheets are the color/Of the irises blooming in their garden,/Bordering the two-foot stone wall;/They planted the irises,/They built the wall,/Their hands know earth, stone,/And now they continue to seek/The undiscovered regions/Of each other’s body, /The new concealed within the old.”

As I’m a writer in my 70’s, I quickly identified with Miller’s commentary on aging in his poignant signature of acceptance entitled “Dusk.” “…Like the long grass of late September/On the meadow where I walk at dusk, /Knowing the darkness will arrive/With a part of me welcoming it.” Again, that quality of wry rapture is caught in another poem about age entitled “No Matter Our Age,” the last nine lines illuminating his acceptance of growing older. “More than your body/I wanted the love/Which flickered in your eyes./So our unwritten history began/Which I value each morning,/Waking to its freshness/No matter our age/Or the architecture/Crumbling around us.”

Approximately 20 years ago, my spiritual director told me I should stop writing “little poems” and begin writing “great poems,” a task which I've attempted for years, and I do know when I read “great poems.” Michael Miller achieves the kind of emotional intensity and integrity that make poems in Into This World “great poems;” in which ordinary themes provoke much serious contemplation.

Cover photograph by Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 “Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403. 

FALL OF ‘33

Cover art by Susan E. Elliott

Pinyon publisher Gary Entsminger and artist Susan Elliott spend most of their time publishing other writers' books in their cabin post called Pinyon Publishing nestled in the Colorado Rockies, but now and then they take time off to produce their own writings and artwork. Together, they have written Remembering the Parables, Making the Most of WriteItNow4, and Ophelia’s Ghost, the latter, an intriguing work of fiction. This novel set in the 50's in the southwestern U.S., featured Eva, an anthropologist who disappeared from a campsite in the Canyons of the Ancients, and readers were treated to encounters with parallel universes, Pueblo cultures, UFO's, Shakespeare and the phenomenon of ghosts.

Fall of '33 takes us back to an earlier time when Eva is only 12 years old, a passenger on a train headed for Django, Colorado. She is deeply immersed in memories of the twenty days preceding her train ride, recalling her life in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and recording them as the train travels west. Her feelings are reflected in nostalgic descriptions about her childhood; e.g., "A boy standing beside a Model A Ford near the tracks waves as we pass. He looks about the same age as Billy, and our farm flashes in my mind, as we drove away in Poppy's Model A…I see Billy the day after I knew we were leaving. We were walking home from the bus stop. A hermit thrush whistled from the woods, its hollow notes ethereal and flute-like. The long shadows disappeared into deeper darkness. Indian summer, but the speckled red and yellow leaves swirling past our feet reminded us that winter was coming…"

The train takes Eva through vivid experiences to the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago, across the Midwest, and into Colorado, but it is the journey in Eva's imagination–the memory of her childhood home and stories told by her Grandfather Poppy–that will capture readers. Eva moves in and out, from visible worlds seen from the window of the train to invisible worlds, which her grandfather explains are important for ancestral connections. "Memory is more than a scrapbook of images," he tells Eva, encouraging her to connect with spirits "on the other side of the veil" to bring about a change in consciousness. Readers are led to believe that she will also receive consolation about moving from her childhood home from ancestral spirits constant in memory.

Stories about Eva's Native American ancestry and the mysticism inherent in these tales are interwoven throughout the novel. They reminded me of an interview with Bill Moyer and the poet Sherman Alexie, in which Alexie emphasizes how important "story" was and is for survival–in Eva's case, the story of her Turtle Island ancestors who survived a great flood and intermingled with newcomers called "the golden ones."

Each chapter title of Fall of  '33, or each day that Eva writes about, is symbolized by a creature or force in the natural world; e.g., turtle, dragon, deer, the river, eagle, red bird, flower…the writing is an assignment given her by Poppy in which she uses the "Day Memory System." Using an image for each day, Eva faithfully records her observations about the landscape and happenings in both the journey and her past life involving friends and family on the farm and in rural social gatherings.

One of the most arresting chapters features the family's venture into Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. On this site, they view a circular ruin, fifty feet across and sunken fifteen feet into the ground which was used as the center of religion for various groups of Native Americans. "The sipapu is this entrance, or passageway, for the souls to emerge from. And the souls, the people, go out on the path, to the center. And when they die, they come back. Out and in and back out again. Like the seasons…a middle place, a meeting ground, where all souls come together..."

Past, present, and future are represented in this complex novel filled with descriptions of the South and West and the impressive narrations by two naturalists who aren't timid about taking readers on a real life journey through dark times and a mystical journey into the life of the spirit enhanced by "story," the stuff of survival.

A poem at the conclusion of the novel completes this mystical journey into the Fall of '33, and the last two stanzas underline the authors' intent to convey the power of dreams and imagination:

"instead

I dance

in a dream

with you

and all the time

in our world."

JOY TOGETHER

Before I left Sewanee, Tennessee to winter in New Iberia, Louisiana, Sister Elizabeth, a sister at St. Mary’s Convent, gave me the name and email address of a friend who is a Presbyterian minister and professor of pastoral theology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. The friend has written several books on spiritual growth and was interested in obtaining a review about her book, Joy Together, Spiritual Practices For Your Congregation, on my blog. As I’m retired and am no longer assigned to a congregation, I thought perhaps the book might have no relevance for me but I was curious to read what this author had to say about spiritual practices. At my bedtime reading, I read half the book in one sitting and was engaged enough to complete my reading the following morning!

One reviewer wrote about Joy Together, “this spiritual journey isn’t about hiking solo,” but I found it to be a good guide to a deeper spiritual life on an individual level, and a cogent text for strengthening Christian congregations. The sections on prayer, hospitality, Sabbath, fasting, etc. could serve as suggestions for an individual to practice a Benedictine-like Rule of Life to deepen his/her faith, as well as provide a guide to building community within dwindling congregations.

Joy Together describes six specific spiritual disciplines in detail to indicate how these practices can be experienced communally: thankfulness; fasting; contemplative prayer; contemplative approaches to Scripture; hospitality; and Sabbath keeping. Baab says that these disciplines, particularly when practiced communally, assist us in resisting the attraction of acquiring an increasing number of possessions and accelerating our materialistic lives… so that we can rest in the love, grace, and peace which derive from God.

I was drawn to the opening chapter about thankfulness in which the author talks about experiencing boredom and repetitiveness in her prayer life twenty years earlier. We all know the drill – making a list of needs and describing those needs at prayer time. Baab writes that she decided to do a thankfulness-in-prayer experiment and was amazed at the many things for which she wanted to thank God: friends, extended family, a neighborhood garden, colorful leaves in the fall…and the “specifics of daily life became more visible to us as manifestations of God’s care. We had always been thankful for food on the table each day, but now many more aspects of our life seemed to flow from the hands of a gracious and generous God…we became more aware of what we had been missing in all those years of prayer times that were packed with our needs and wants. We simply hadn’t noticed God’s good gifts to us…”

From those realizations about how blessed she and her family were, Baab proceeded to introduce thankfulness praying in church groups, a support group of women clergy, and other small groups. In Joy Together, she emphasizes that prayers of thankfulness enable us to see what God has been doing and where God has been working…such prayers make us stop and look. “I wonder if the lack of vitality in so many congregations comes in part from the paucity of our thankfulness,” she writes…”if gratitude is a central way to express dependence on God and our desire to be together with God, then we may be missing a primary route to divine intimacy…”

Another cogent chapter in Joy Together deals with hospitality, the ancient practice that describes some of Jesus’ most memorable encounters with individuals, the most significant example being that of the last meal with His disciples. Baab advocates congregational hospitality in homes and in hosting the wider community. She emphasizes the latter in a Celtic saying, “Often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise,” citing service to the homeless and disenfranchised as examples of Christ’s hospitality. She sums up: “Hospitality requires a skill in thinking that affirms the significance of trading hospitality back and forth, the way my parents did so well and so generously, while also affirming the joys of engaging with strangers, the marginalized and unexpected guests.”

Each chapter in Joy Together ends with questions for reflection, discussion, or journaling, and recommendations for further reading. This is a distinctive book about the use of practices that deepen faith in individuals and in entire congregations so that transformation can occur in both cases. It’s enlivened by the author’s own experiences and those of individuals she meets in her work as a minister and professor of pastoral theology.

A memorable quote from Henri Nouwen is featured in the text: “The word discipline means ‘the effort to create some space in which God can act.’ Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up.” In the midst of our days being filled up with Christmas hecktivity and consumerism, Joy Together is a “must read.” Create some space in which God can act.