|
Evoking the Elusive Bridge
Water Lines: New and Selected Poems
By Luci Shaw
Eerdmans, 2003. 111 pages.
Reviewed by John Tintera
In “Burnt Norton,” one of the greatest religious poems of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot conveys the difficulty the religious poet faces in trying to express intimations of divinity: “Words strain / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.” Poets through the centuries have employed different poetic strategies to bridge the chasm described by Eliot. In the English language, religious poets generally look to the Psalter for inspiration, where a number of poetic strategies can be found. The Psalmists make use of direct pleas to God, hymns of praise from overflowing hearts, warnings to the unenlightened by those who have seen the light, and, my favorite, evocations of places that seem to be blessed by the presence or fullness of God. The most famous Psalm of all, the Twenty-Third, combines of all four of these modes.
If one were looking for the poetic starting point for Luci Shaw’s newest collection of poems, Water Lines, one need look no further than the second verse of the Twenty-Third Psalm: “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” The line evokes an image of a person awakening to faith as he or she observes the beautiful quiet of a pond, lake, or perhaps the sea itself on a calm summer morning. More than anything else, Luci Shaw is a poet of place, and in these poems she pays homage to the ways in which nature can stir the heart and mind to faith.
The first poem in the book, “Between the lines,” begins like this: “I can’t help noticing.” Whether she’s sitting beside the still waters, or standing underneath a torrent, Shaw is constantly noticing the world around her and in each moment sensing the light step of God leading the way. Here’s “Between the lines”:
I can’t help noticing
how falling leaves and rain
print their trajectories --
traces in the air, on the window glass --
as if writing some cosmic equation.
My algebra was always bad but
trigonomotry -- its angles
and curves, its tangents and sines
and signs -- always wakes something
quite beyond logic in my heart.
As if the mystery of existence were becoming
visible -- my small gasps of prayer,
meant to rise, not fall, triangulating
in the wind. And the simple
snow -- each flake unique, intact as it
flies through space -- giving chaos
a chance to re-integrate to a kind of holy
order, filling cracks, hollows -- the muddy ruts
in the playing field behind the school
white, beautifully level again.
The space evoked here is a room in the poet’s house where rain can be seen falling against a window. This leads the mind to free associate memories of learning trigonometry in school. From there, the mind travels to the perfection of a snowflake crystal, in which space and matter are super-organized in radial geometric brilliance. Each flake falling through space evokes a geometry which is in turn traced in the pattern of its structure. As the flakes collect on the playing field (the field of action), the world takes on the serenity of the still waters described by the Psalmist. For the poet, at least, the mystery of existence has indeed become visible.
In addition to her use of spatial imagery to evoke divine presence, Shaw often calls upon a fifth tradition of religious poetry, that of mysticism. Mysticism, as a way of expressing divinity, is largely absent from the psalms, and appears in the Old Testament primarily in the prophetic literature. For the religious poet, mysticism is the bursting forth of some aspect of God’s radiance into the world of the human senses. The books of Ezekiel and Daniel contain memorable instances of this poetic mode. In the New Testament, the story of the Transfiguration and the Book of Revelation also tell of direct personal experience of the divine realm. In the Christian tradition, there have been many books that describe these kinds of experiences and show disciples how to prepare for such a gift themselves. Even St. Paul confessed to being taken up into the seventh heaven. The best example in English of this tradition is the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the flight of a hawk and the spots on a cow, Hopkins was able to perceive the fire of God ablaze in creation. Several of Shaw’s poems begin with epigraphs from Hopkins, so we know we’re in Hopkins territory when we read poems like this one, “Edges of Wales,” which, like “Between the lines,” begins with active noticing:
Stalking the blind lanes, striding to the hill
top before daybreak, often I’ve ached at the sweet chill
of spring light glittering through an intricacy
of leaves, when, in its precision of green, every tree
turns candle. With a series of airy, sharp surprises
crow’s wings fold pearly heaven. Then the full sun rises,
polishing the view -- stones quick and wet as steel,
glitter on a cobweb, gravel under my heel.
But on this early day in May, I wake
through light opaque as milk. The hedgerows make
mysteries with the mist. The cries of sheep shiver
the drenched air. Like silk sliding away, the river
moves south, the sheen of its crease
supple between banks and bushes blanched as fleece.
I thought I loved the hard, bright edges best
until I melted in this morning’s mist.
The poem describes two instances of mystical experience. The first occurs on a clear, crisp day where the trees are perceived to be so infused with Light that they are transformed into candles; the second happens on a foggy day where the author experiences ecstasy in the gentle mist that covers the countryside. Poetically, Shaw does a fine job of communicating her exuberance through her skillful use of rhyme and alliteration. What’s more, the description of the river as a “crease” in line 13 is one of the most surpassing and original uses of language in the entire collection. Like mystical experience itself, which is often described with images drawn from romantic passion or the battlefield, poems in this tradition tend to pull out all the stops. “Edges of Wales” ends with an echo of Hopkins: Shaw’s “I melted in this morning’s mist recalls the famous opening of “The Windhover” (“I caught this morning’s minion . . .”).
In the past few years, thousands of books have been published about the spirituality of “the ordinary.” While I can’t say that I’ve read them all, I’ve read enough to know that ordinary life holds much more drama and offers much more inspiration than even the best of them. Still, nothing in this spiritual tradition prepared me for some of the final few poems in “Water Lines.” In them, Lucy Shaw writes of what can only be her personal obsession with collecting beach glass, shells, and beach stones. In poems like “Beachcombing,” “Glass Beach,” and “Found this morning,” Shaw talks about these objects as if they were gold. In “Found this morning,” for example, she describes one particular harvest of beach stones, after which she came home and lined them up end-to-end, “aligning the chalky stripes so that what looks like a white string connects them all together!” Later in the poem she says, “What greater happiness could anyone know than collecting accidental stones to place end to end?”
What I find so enchanting about Shaw’s description of collecting objects along the beach is its utter disingenuousness and immediacy. It’s so like a child to delight in lining up your stones just so and in my mind it is Shaw’s poems about beach-combing that succeed best. In them, Shaw seems to forget about her “job” as a religious poet and the linguistic problems posed by her chosen trade. By focusing on what delights her, she creates a poetic space that probably comes closest to evoking the elusive bridge that religious poets are always chasing -- an Eden where God’s presence is so closely felt, there’s no need to fret about the best way to get it down on paper.
John Tintera is a marketing manager with Holtzbrinck Publishers. He spent one year studying for the Catholic priesthood.
|
