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The Green Earth: Poems of Creation
By Luci Shaw
Eerdmans, 2002, 79 pages
Reviewed by John Tintera
It is said that Queen Victoria kept a copy of Tennyson’s long and moving meditation on death, In Memoriam, on her nightstand next to her bible. The Green Earth is deserving of a place alongside our great poet-guides in the collection of every serious spiritual seeker.
Like In Memoriam, The Green Earth follows the seasons of one year in the life of the poet. The dominant image, as one might imagine from the title, is that of greenness -- a sign of hope and plenty. The three chapters of The Green Earth are called “Early Green,” “Summer Green,” and “Green to Gold.” Winter finds a home in the first poems of “Early Green” and in the last poems of the section on autumn. It is apparent that for Shaw, winter is something that we are moving either away from or toward -- it does not have the status of a place or home unto itself.
As a late Romantic, Tennyson was able to weave philosophical musings and classical religious motifs into his boundless love of nature -- all in just the right balance for the Queen. Shaw seems to be following in these footsteps. Nature is clearly her muse, but she knows its dark side, and that Christ’s redeeming love is ever in the wings. This is most evident in the soft, musical poem, “Benediction: Opening the Summer Cottage,” which ends with the line, “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord.” At first blush, the quote from the penitential Psalm 51 seems out of place, but it fits right in with Shaw’s consciousness of the mutability of joy.
Some poems like, “Inscriptions,” and “Showers in the Foothills,” give commonplace events like gardening or a spring rainfall a spiritual significance. My favorite of this group is “Flathead Lake, Montana,” from the summer chapter. Even without the epigraph from Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Christ plays in ten thousand places”), it is clear that Shaw is paying homage to the Victorian-age Jesuit:
Lying here on the short grass, I am
a bowl for sunlight.
Silence. A bee. The lip lip of water
over stones. The swish and slap, hollow
under the dock. Down-shore
a man sawing wood.
Christ in the sunshine laughing
through the green translucent wings
of maple seeds. A bird
resting its song on two notes.
Other poems are more explicitly religious. These include “Rising: The Underground Tree,” “Stigmata,” and the hymn-like “A Song for Simplicity,” which has this beautiful stanza, the fourth line of which is an apt image for The Green Earth itself:
Glory again to God for word and phrase
whose magic, matching the mind’s computed leap
lands on the lip of truth
(plain as a stone well’s mouth, and just as deep),
and for the drum, the bell, the flute, the harp, the bird,
for music, Praise! That speaks without a word.
Between these two types of poem are sprinkled three little gems, “Forecast,” “April,” and “Windy.” Here is “Forecast”:
(A strong statement from someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest!)
What I like best about The Green Earth (and what reminds me so much of Tennyson) is the poet’s belief that neither the natural world nor religion have the final word about life and God -- we must listen to both in order to understand both. While individual poems often hammer out a tentative conclusion, time, the changing of the seasons, or some remembered verse from a hymn or the bible constantly stand in the way of any final, definitive statement.
Shaw gives herself away in her introduction where she records a marvelous quote from Annie Dillard on “the meaning of life:” “We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing, so each thing gets noticed. . . so that Creation need not play to an empty house.” Shaw has clearly made that her motto, and in The Green Earth, she shows us how it’s done.
John Tintera is a marketing manager with Holtzbrinck Publishers. He spent one year studying for the Catholic priesthood.
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