Charles of the Desert by William Woolfitt

William Woolfitt
Charles of the Desert 

Paraclete Press
http://www.paracletepress.com


By the numbers 

ISBN 978-1-612-61764-0 
Publication: 2016
Total pages: 77
Number of poems: 52

While I've never met William Woolfitt in person, I'm a fan of his poetry, especially his devotion to evocative detail, for example his recent poems in HEArt, an online journal that promotes the role of artists as human rights activists. I'm glad to have a chance to review his second book of poetry Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse. 

 —Nancy Chen Long

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William Woolfitt is the author of three poetry collections: Beauty Strip (2014), Charles of the Desert (2016), and Spring Up Everlasting (Paraclete Press, forthcoming). His fiction chapbook The Boy with Fire in His Mouth (2014) won the Epiphany Editions contest judged by Darin Strauss. His poems and short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Image, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Epoch, Spiritus, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Denny C. Plattner Award from Appalachian Heritage.

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Charles of the Desert by William Woolfitt brims with beautiful writing. In the book, Woolfitt tells us the story of Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman born in 1858 to a wealthy Catholic family who, after a youthful season of debauchery, experienced a religious conversion in 1886. Charles subsequently rededicated himself to Catholicism, becoming a monk and then an ordained priest. A searcher, both spiritually and physically, his travels took him from France to Algeria, Morocco, Syria, the Holy Land, and then back to central Sahara where he lived as a man of the region in a commitment of solidarity with the local people. Charles was killed at the age of 58, some say by thieves searching for weapons and gold, some say by rebels. He had few converts while living. His influence came primarily after death, as others learned of his life and writing. The order called the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus was inspired by the example of Charles' life. He is perhaps most known for the Prayer of Abandonment and was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2005. 

Charles of the Desert isn't divided into sections like most poetry books. It flows from beginning to end as a biography, one enriched through Woolfitt's exquisite imagination. The poems in the book are each marked with a year and location, except for the final poem, which depicts Charles' assassination. To give an overview of the entirety of Charles' life, Woolfitt also provides both a synopsis and a chronology at the end of the book. 

All of the poems in the book are told in the first person, with Charles de Foucauld as the speaker. The first three poems concern Charles when he was a young boy, six-ish, while his parents were still alive. The first poem "My Father as Weather Formation," introduces Woolfitt's fine attention to detail that carries throughout the book. For example, in one stanza, Charles described his father veering from tree to tree after they arrive in the woods after a family drive:

               He presses his hand to the bark, rips a leaf, scribbles, 
               picks a thread from his tweed coat (its sleeve 
               scours my cheek, becomes burlap in memory), 
               bites a spotted plum in half, exposing the stone that glistens 
               like the pig hearts I saw, on tiptoe, at the butchery.

The five poems that come after the ones in which Charles' parents are still alive touch on his life with his grandfather, his teenage years and early twenties, and his service as a soldier in military. The remainder of the book—the bulk of it—is dedicated to Charles' search for meaning, his subsequent conversion and embrace of the Catholic church, and his life as a monk, hermit, and ordained priest.

The poems in Charles of the Desert range from highly narrative to tightly compressed lyric. An example of a poem that leans more narrative is "Tether," in which Charles tells us how he spent the day while in living in a monastery in Ardèche, France, " After high mass, I turn / to chores: I pull thistles, rub the brass .. // ... In my free hour, I read the breviary." 

An example of a more lyrical poem is  "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," set in Algeria in 1903. After Charles became a monk, he returned to Algeria, having served there earlier in his life as cavalry officer. Returning as a religious, Charles secured the freedom of slaves by paying for their ransom.  In "Meditation on the Hands of the Ex-Slave," Charles studies the hands of a slave whose freedom he has purchased. This poem does a great deal of heavy lifting with few words. Looking at one stanza as an example, Charles us "He clenches them / like tree buds—never open, / always spring." One possible reading of the poem is through synecdoche, in which the slave's hands represent the whole of the man. Aristotle wrote in "On the Soul" that "the soul is analogous to the hand." If hands are a stand-in for the person, then the comparison of the ex-slave's scarred and weathered clenched fists to tree buds that never open leads to sorrow and a sense of choked promise. Those feelings are amplified in the next line, "always spring," which confronts the reader with the open-wound in the soul of the man, a wound inflicted by slavery: At first blush, one would assume the slave's freedom would be a kind of spring and that the idea of it being "always spring" might be a good thing. However, for this reader at least, I felt the opposite—that the fullness of the ex-slave's life, the unfolding of his soul here in this world, might never flower into its summer, instead remaining hidden and stifled, always tight in the bud. 

Woolfitt is brilliant at balancing both the lyric and narrative in one poem, an example of which can be seen in the "Gold Eater," set in Pont-à-Mousson, France during Charles' early twenties, when he was a womanizer and given to excess: 

          Gold Eater

             Give me fruits, spoils, fats, touches, tastes. 
             The buds of my tongue cry for mushrooms, pungent cheese,
             magic foods charmed from the dark, delights slurped
             or torn with teeth. I take, and take, and take.
             I take from the bent man who crept the cellar stairs
             each day to riddle the champagne bottle an eighth of a turn,
             nudging it upside down to settle the cloud of dead

             yeast cells in its wired neck. And from a goose
             in a wooden crate (so small, she could not move);
             she ate forced portions, never saw the sun. 
             Augers slid into an airhole (drilled in the crate’s lid),
             slid into her beak and craw; then kernels slid down
             the auger’s grooves, to stuff her gut, and pillow
             her liver in golden fat. And hats, brooches, furs,
             these I strip from the merchant’s rack for Violette,

             who ripped her hem the first June night she flitted
             over my sill, laughing and moon-gilt. Violette poses
             while I sketch her. I like her soft and naked as a bud. 
             I thumb the fat of her arm, count the time
             before my mark fades. When she bores me, I try
             horse races, quail, grouse, and buntings by the brace,
             card games, and imported cigars. Violette rigs a beggar
             costume that I will don to sneak away from officer duties. 
             We shutter the windows, stuff scarves under the door-crack
             to banish the coming day. We stagger, topple two chairs,
             our bodies prodigal and blind, my hand reading her face. 

           (first published in Saint Katherine Review)

In addition to free verse poems, there are sonnets, as well as poems that follow a patterned rhyme scheme, for example one intriguing poem, "Desert Bath at Sunset." It employs the same end word using the repetition pattern of a pantoum: ABCD BEDF EGFH and so on.  In addition, prose poems and epistolary poems are positioned throughout. Several of the epistles are written to a possibly fictionalized sister named Beatrix. (Biographies of Charles indicate he had one sister, whose name was Marie.)  The epistolary and prose poems read like flash fiction, fleshing out the story, for example the prose poem "The Rope Maker," a version of which you can read here on page 20 under the title "Metamorphosis."

The book also has a sense of immediacy to it. Woolfitt makes frequent use of the present tense, giving the story a freshness, a feeling that is just happened. This can be seen in the final poem of the book, "Someone Knocks," shown below. It's unlike the other poems in the book, with its use of white space to impact the pacing of the poem and its lack of punctuation. It leaves the reader seeing Charles' pages of translated Tuareg poetry flying with the wind, and perhaps analogously, his spirit as well scattering with those pages when he was killed. The lack of punctuation and final image render the story open-ended, suggesting that Charles lives on, which he does in a way, inspiring the Catholic faithful and others even today.

Charles of the Desert is a beautifully written biography-in-verse that holds a reader's attention from the first poem until the end. Woolfitt's imagination and gift with detail bring Charles de Foucauld to life in a compelling and fresh way. Woolfitt wrote in the book's Preface that, after much research and what seemed like a stepping away from his previous autobiographical poems, "I may have made a version of Charles in my own image." Indeed, the Charles de Foucauld depicted by Woolfitt is highly personal. Perhaps that's because we can feel the heart and soul of the poet in each poem. It's a book worth reading more than once.

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Someone Knocks
by William Woolfitt

and I fling open my door
                 it isn't the man who brings my mail
but men with guns            my neighbors           Haratin
and Tuareg             joined in a fellagha rezzou
they wrench and tie my arms                    slam me against
the wall ransack my little fort                 unbind
               and fling
                                    my Tuareg dictionary
                                                my sheaves of Tuareg poetry
drag Jean from supper and his wife
                                                                           tie him beside me

tear the cross       the heart        from my robe
my chest is puny               white as glue
                my ribs like my mother's fan
my spirit an egret               my belly a roost
I feel       the breath       and the burn
as my lips form                       the word I choose
                                    and my pages scatter in the wind


"Gold Eater" and “Someone Knocks,” © William Woolfitt, Charles of the Desert  (Paraclete Press, 2016)

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Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow. She is the author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.

Rabbit Punch! by Greg Santos

Greg Santos 
Rabbit Punch! 

DC Books 
http://dcbooks.ca/index.html 


By the numbers 

ISBN 978-1-927599-22-8 
Publication: 2014 
Total pages: 76 
Number of poems: 61

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Greg Santos, a Canadian poet and graphic designer who teaches creative writing to at-risk youth, is also the poetry editor for carte blanche. He lives in Montreal with his wife and two children. Greg and I know each other via social media, both of us having been active participants in a couple of projects sponsored by The Found Poetry Review (FPR). When Greg's second book of poetry, Rabbit Punch!, was released, he asked me to review it. The book's cover and title, as well as what I knew of his poetry, led me to suspect that the book would be an imaginative foray into pop culture, that it would be filled with humorous, witty—at times dark or surreal—poems. I accepted his invitation. As it turns out, the book is as I anticipated; it does not disappoint. You can read all about it in the review below.

Greg was also kind enough to do an interview. You can find out more about his thoughts on poetry and his books here.

—Nancy Chen Long

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Greg Santos' second book Rabbit Punch! is filled with lithe poems, quick on their feet, poems that are witty, whimsical, serious, sarcastic, celebratory, bittersweet. Some are entertaining, while others are deceptively so—poems layered with meaning that reward upon repeated readings. Santos has dedicated the book to the memory of his mentor Paul Violi and in some of the poems, it's evident that such mentors and favorite poets have exerted a heavy influence over Santos' work. 

Rabbit Punch! is divided into three sections. Each of the sections has a variety of different types of poems, from traditional to experimental. The majority of the poems are short, i.e., less than a page long. While the poems cover an array of subjects, the majority of them include some treatment or reference to Western popular culture. However, the first section, taken as a whole, has fewer references to pop culture than the other two sections. The poems here are a bit more personal and lyrical. One of my favorites is "Lullaby":

Lullaby

A little way ahead
winter is come

Do you remember
it ever being so cold?

Ash trees burn
above white paths

The sky goes on
with cool indifference

Wheels of the train
fall silent

We have arrived
at the junction

All creatures
don their coats

A little way ahead
winter is come

In addition, the first section has an international bent as well, with a good dose of things French, which can be seen based on the titles alone, e.g., “La Mue” and “It’s Snowing in Paris.” And Santos also gives a nod in this first section to fairy tale and myth. For example, in the poem “Cronus,” an intriguing poem that's only three lines long, Santos approaches the Cronus myth—the god of time that devours all—through the metaphor of a farmer: 

The farmer has a basket full of eggs.
He wonders if he should bring them back to their coop.
But they are his children and he is hungry.

And in “Hansel and Gretel,” Santos depicts a story different from the Grimm Brothers' version. Instead of victims, in Santos' world, Hansel and Gretel are instigators, defying their parents because they want to find the witch—they’re actively seeking “peppermint, floss, and doom.” The line “We were ready to die for love” and last line of the poem “At long last, love in all its glory” suggest that Hansel and Gretel believed the witch to be Love. There are a number of ways in which to read that sentiment. One of the more obvious ones is that Hansel and Gretel were evil like the witch. Another is that they were so unloved they would love anything that beckoned, so desperate that they grasped at evil, thinking that's what love looks like. While both readings are surprising and fresh, the second is punch in gut that left this reader thinking about it for days. 

The second section of Rabbit Punch! is prefaced with the first three lines of Dean Young's "Sean Penn Anti-Ode." It's an appropriate presage for this section filled with poems about Western public figures, cultural icons, and folklore: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, model/socialite Paris Hilton,  caped crusader Batman, the actor Charlie Sheen, American politician John McCain, the Tooth Fairy, aliens, and more, all find a home in this section. 

A number of these poems in the second section are dramatic monologues written in the persona of a famous figure. In "I May Be Macho but I'm no Genius" (another one of Santos' poems that appears to be humorous, but is not), professional wrestler Randy Savage tells us "I'm more Burger King than Macho King. ... I wouldn't wish Macho Madness on anyone, brother." The last line "I miss Elizabeth," transforms the poem from one of sarcasm or mockery to one of sadness. Elizabeth had been Savage's romantic interest, as well as his wrestling manager. When she left Savage for another wrestler (Hulk Hogan), it unsettled the world of professional wrestling. Elizabeth was stalked and even injured. She died of a drug overdose in 2003. If the last line of the poem refers to when she left Savage, then the poem is a wistful one about heartbreak. However, if it refers to when she died, then the poem is one of mourning, a poem of grief and regret, especially in light of the poem's epigraph: "Reincarnation doesn't have to be. You can concentrate and you can mental telepathy. Yeah!" The epigraph is a quote by Savage from a 1987 promotional. The quote might elicit ridicule from the reader when first read, but by the end of the poem, all one feels is pity.

It's not all famous figures in the second section. The poet-persona also makes an appearance, with the poet as a first person narrator. Even so, some pop-culture aspect is still prominently featured. For example, in "A Wild Night at Hooters," the narrator recounts a fictional evening at the American restaurant Hooters, an evening spent with famous dead poets and writers (e.g., "We'd get smashed drinking Coors, spot Whitman coming onto Frost, / we'd have to keep Yeats away from the dartboards.") And in the endearing poem "The Great Hoarder," which is the last poem of this section, Santos gifts us with a narrator who hoards in the spirit of Hoarders, that American television show about people who compulsively keep things forever. However, instead of hoarding material objects, the narrator hoards thoughts and questions while his family sleeps.

In the third and final section of the book, we find a collection of surreal and experimental poems. The opening poem "Imaginationland" (which is also the title of a series of episodes of the animated TV show South Park) takes us on a quick jaunt through the "the Tim Burton-ish forest" in the narrator's head, where "squirrels dance merrily with foxes" and "My family waits for me in a gingerbread house." In addition, this third section houses poems about a New York that is "left of the center of the universe" and advice poems about how to handle ghost hares ("Don't play dead. And whatever you do, don't act like a carrot. / Wearing orange around ghost hares is suicidal.") There are poems about poems, even a poem that wants "you to trust it," but not immediately. No, it "wants you to hold hands first for a while before getting serious." 

This final section is also a celebration of some of the poets who have influenced Santos: The poem "We're all Just Passing Strange" is dedicated to Santos' mentor Paul Violi and the line from that poem"Suffering from the morning of the poem" could be a reference to James Schuyler's epic poem "The Morning of the Poem." A number of poems are patterned after poets that Santos admires, notably "Meanwhile, What I'm Going To Do" and "We the Wild Bunch" (the link is to a video of Santos reading his poem) are written after John Ashberry and "Types of Silence" and "The Disease is Its Remedy" are written after Mark Strand. Indeed, in the the spirit of celebration, Santos openly confesses here his love of the art: "I have a unique condition. / I am prescribed to eat poetry for the rest of my days. / Do not cry for me; it is a happy ailment" ("The Disease is Its Remedy.")

In the last poem of the book, "A Vanishing Act," a magician pulls "rabbits out of a top hat," wields the tools of illusion "fog and mirrors," intones special words "to distract" the audience. Magician as conjurer; poet as conjurer. It reminded me of what Jane Hirshfield wrote in "Strange Reaches, Impossibility, and Big Hidden Drawers: Poetry and Paradox" (The Writers Chronicle, Feb 2015)—that in a good poem, sometimes one finds oneself "inside both the realm of the most common human truths and the realms of sequin and smoke, of scarf-trick and card-trick and mirrors that at once reveal and hide." One will find such poems in Rabbit Punch! From poem to poem, one can sense Santos' imagination hard at work to extend, as he says in his interview, "poetry's potential to both entertain and enlighten." Santos shared that he was interested "in exploring the idea that everything and anything is fair game to be poetic fodder." And in that, he has found success.

__________

Oblivion Avenue
- by Greg Santos

When you make the decision to leave
and your loved ones wave their handkerchiefs from the docks
like a million mad flappings of Daffy Duck's beak,
you can't help wondering if you've made the right choice.

We leave the shores and drift so all that is left of our past
is an infinitesimal speck on an ancient iceberg,
complaining about its arthritis and bad hips,
melting toward oblivion.

Where? Oblivion Avenue.
You make a left turn at Albuquerque.
Bugs Bunny always made a wrong toin at Albukoikee
but he somehow turned out fine. A wrong turn didn't stop him.

No. Even with Elmer Fudd at the end of the tunnel,
what didn't shoot Bugs made him stronger. He had the right idea.
Burrowing frantically through the dirt
toward a golden carrot that probably never has or ever will exist.

We all have an Elmer Fudd waiting for us at our final destination,
shotgun in hand, hiding among the welcoming throngs on the boardwalk.
Remember, fold your rabbit ears under your bowler hat.
He'll never suspect a thing.


"Lullaby," "Cronus," and “Oblivion Avenue,” © Greg Santos Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014)

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Lemonstone Reading Series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Mason's Road, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Review of Entering the House of Awe by Susanna Childress

Susanna Childress

Entering the House of Awe

New Issues Press

http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/

By the numbers

ISBN 978-1-936970-00-1
Publication: 2011
Total pages: 85
Number of poems: 43

__________

I first met Susanna Childress in the spring of 2008 while I was attending the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary. A professor at Hope College, she had been brought in as a guest instructor to teach a poetry course in the Writing-as-Ministry track. Susanna’s influence, both as a teacher and through her poetry, is one of the main reasons why I am involved in poetry today. I was swept away by her first book Jagged With Love. A fan of her writing, I am no less in love with this, her second book, discussed below. I also had the opportunity to interview her. Click here for the interview and to read more about her. —Nancy Chen Long

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Susanna Childress’ second book of poetry Entering the House of Awe is no quick read. It is filled with richly-layered poems that invite the reader to stay a while, to come back again and again. The title itself is the reader’s first clue of the layered-ness that will be found in the poems: the
phrase “entering the house of awe” is taken from Psalm 5, “But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house, I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you” (NRSV translation). Notice that in crafting the title, Childress deviates a bit from the passage. Whereas the psalmist, who in a state of awe, enters a physical house (“your holy temple”), the poet enters a house that is not physical, but emotional: the house being entered is awe itself. In this turning of the phrase, Childress conflates the emotional state of being in awe with that of being in the house of God.

In addition, Childress’ selection of the word ‘awe’ is telling. If she would have selected a different translation of that passage, such as that of the New American Standard Bible or the King James Version, she could have, instead, applied the word “reverence" or the word “fear” respectively. But Childress selected a translation that yielded the word “awe”—a wonderful word that can mean opposite things, running the gamut from its newer connotation of wondrous admiration to its older connotation of fearful dread. Through the title of the book, Childress signals that the poetry contained in it will be grappling with matters of faith from a primarily Judeo-Christian perspective. But it is not a Pollyanna faith in which everything is roses. No—the poems in Entering the House of Awe at times confront the reader with an honesty that borders on raw.

Before moving to specifics, I’d like to take a look at the book as whole, by first covering some of the overarching themes that bind the poems together, followed by some of the primary poetic characteristics of the book.

Themes. While the title suggests something otherworldly, the book is definitely rooted in this world. The overarching theme of the book is relationship, both familial and societal. Two other primary themes include witness and the body: the poems of witness, in which the speaker gives voice to violence that s/he has seen, heard, or experienced, do not shrink from discomfort; they are unwavering. The poems of the body include exploration of its frailty, e.g., “Everybody Must Pass Stones,” which touches on a father’s ailments in his later years (and which you can read here—it’s the second poem on the page). But the theme of body is not centered only on frailty and illness. The sensual is also front and center. It is the tender kiss on a lover’s shoulder (“The Boiled Clean Feel of Your Bones”). It is a first orgasm with a lover (“Of Course I Hit at the Moon”). It is the absurdity of having sex while sick (“In the Middle of a Long Illness”). Taken as a whole, what you will find in this book is what Frank Burch Brown calls an immanent transcendence—the sacred immersed in the fullness of human experience.

Poetic characteristics. One of the major characteristics of Childress’ poetry is her love affair with words, her gift for language. You can see it in the brimming good wordiness of the poems. You know it in the way she wields her impressive vocabulary, which, depending on the reader, can be candy or kryptonite. (Keep your dictionary handy as you read this book!) You can feel it in her well-crafted turns of phrase. Take for example the last poem of the book “Sweetly from the Tree,” first published in Books & Culture, in which the speaker begins the poem by addressing the stamen of a flowering tree about how surrender/endings can be beginnings, how their surrender to bees fills the honeycomb:

Listen,stamen: your surrender is just a beginning,
the spinous distance between desire and the quiet
clinch of satisfaction. Take the hexagon, how it
will fill, fanned with wings that mean to bring
April's nascent truths. …

The word “spinous” to describe the distance between desire and satisfaction is slightly ambiguous. The primary meaning is “thorny” or filled with thorns—suggesting that to get from desire to satisfaction will be prickly and unpleasant. And at the same time, it also brings to mind the image of a spine, straight and narrow, a thin and easily traversed distance—suggesting that little distance stands between the desire and its satisfaction. Also, notice the word “nascent,” a beautiful word that refreshes the idea of beginnings mentioned in the first line, only to be followed by another meditation on surrender, the surrender that is winter, the surrender of the bees: “In winter, I will not ask / where the bees have gone. I will walk to the grove / in my old boots and give ear.” In the remainder of the poem, the speaker then turns to speak to the bees. Here are those remaining stanzas for you to enjoy:

                                       … . Littlest of lovers,
vested in pistil and comb, I speak now to you: dance

your tremble. Perhaps you of all, not drone but roamer, know
what purple means—given, some morning darker than

the human hymn of misgivings, you turn home
and make there what the orchid could not, alone.

Only your precision is a secret: prism of nectar, haven of gold—
I want what you want, and the stamen, and the sun.

Also related to language, another trademark characteristic of Childress’ current work is her penchant for long, expansive lines and complex syntax. As we’ll see later on, some sentences are parsed out over the course of five or more longer-lined stanzas.

A third major characteristic of the work in this particular book is the compelling formal variety. You’ll find a number of poems in the sonnet form. For example, there is a sonnet sequence in the book, and each of the four sections of the book ends in a sonnet. You’ll also find a few prose poems in the form of a block of solid text with flush right and left margins. There are free-verse poems written in standard stanzas, such as couplets and quatrains. And there are free-verse poems in what some might call an experimental form—shaped on the page. Childress is skilled in the use of white space to physically shape a poem in order to impact the pacing, to inject emotion, to signal emotional disruption, to effect tone. The look of these shaped poems on the page is compelling. But it isn’t only the free-verse poems that get shaped. She applies this skill to some of the sonnets and prose poems as well, which you will see later on.

Now that we’ve taken a brief look at the book as a whole, let’s delve into a bit more detail, starting with a short description of each of its four sections. In the first section, the primary motif is mother, and the poems range from poems about the speaker’s mother (e.g., “Mother as Water-Damaged Book”) to poems where a mother or mothers figure prominently (e.g. “The Wry World Shakes Its Head,” a mediation on Isaiah 40 in which Childress wryly presents a set of characters who would be the perfect guests on a Jerry Springer show), to those where mother is but a mention, an imprint (e.g., the ekphrasticpoem “Serpentine,” which you can read here, published under the titled “After Andrei Rublev's The Savior of Zvenigorod, 15th C.”).

The second section turns towards the male, be it a father (e.g., “In the Pocket of Your Winter Coat”) or a husband-lover (e.g. “All Hallow Even”) or a friend (e.g., “Why Every Man Should Knit”) or a critic (“Sōlus Meets Ispe,” which is smart and entertaining retort) or a nationally-celebrated man, long dead (e.g., “A Note to Martin Luther King, Jr.Regarding the Use of Certain Transitive and Intransitive Verbs) or even an imaginary secret admirer (“Love, Anonymous”).

In the third section, the motif that binds it together is the frailty of the human body, for example “Dashed to Pieces like the Potter’s Vessel,” which you can read here, published under the title “Letter to King's Daughter Hospital, Room 244.” This third section also turns more solidly to the speaker’s father. For example, in the Italian sonnet “Gallimaufry of Love,” the epigraph and the first two-and-a-half stanzas are about the father’s heart surgery. The volta in the sestet turns the poem from the consideration of the father’s heart, to a quick nod to blood, and then to female circumcision: “You hero, heart! You hapless blood: exact bouillon of my father’s / myocardium and Mariama Barrie’s infibulated clitoris, blood from skin / of labium minora and majora cut away. She, too, recumbent … .” A poem that starts off as a poem about a father’s surgery ends up being about a number of other things as well, including the idea of that modification of the body is art—the art of surgery—as the poem ends on both the speaker's father and Mariama Barrie (at the age of her circumcision): “Surgeries / make art of the body: marvel this canvas, age sixty-two, another, ten.”

The fourth section is shorter than the other sections, being comprised of three poems. The motif of beginnings and endings ties these three poems together, such as “Listen stamen: your surrender is just a beginning,” the first line of “Sweetly from the Tree,” which was discussed earlier. In addition, nature, while peppered throughout this book, figures prominently here. For example, “You Look across the Earth and See”—a poem in which the speaker addresses W. B. Yeats and weaves in lines and allusions to some his poems—begins with the wind: “Tell me you’ve found the wind to help hear all things loud and beautiful.” The poem then brings in pigeons, swans, ending with the sky, bees: “… tell me Unleash the Brigand God, held cold / and endless as the sky, as cold and restless as ourselves, all we who seek // the bee-loud glade: it does us good—doesn’t it?—to sleep, to old, to gray.”

With the overview of the sections under our belt, I’d like to take a look at “What’s Done,” which is the first poem of the book, and spend some time there because it embodies a good number of the major characteristics of the book.

You might recall that Psalm 5 is the inspiration for the title of book—it is a supplication addressed to God. And likewise the first poem of the book is also a supplication addressed to God. In addition, “What’s Done” also incorporates the elements of “mother” and “witness,” being a nine-stanza poem about mothers who abuse their children. The poem opens with the speaker addressing God:

Lord       about the women who pummel their children
in public                                Sweet Jesus
both you and I been angry enough to shake a baby to turn over tables    Lady

at the airport flinging her spatula of a girl again              and again
into a chair      SIT   loud enough to render an ocean still only
she isn’t     she wails   You saw

the one in the grocery store dangle her son by an ankle       drop him
head-first into her cart    Like Peter he stayed upside down
squalling and I swear                           I was a pillar of salt in the aisle

In the above stanzas, the speaker recounts in jagged spurts what she has seen, while in the third line she includes both herself and “Sweet Jesus” in the group of abusers. Throughout the poem, Childress skillfully juxtaposes the speaker’s witness of abuse with that of violence in the bible, e.g., a son dangling by an ankle upside down juxtaposed with Peter dangling from a cross upside down.

This first poem of the book also demonstrates Childress’ lean towards a longer, expansive line. Sometimes those long lines spill smoothly across the page, water from a pail. And sometimes, as is the case here, they fracture and sputter as Childress shapes the broken text to mirror human brokenness.

The above three-stanza snippet also shows Childress’ inventive formal use of spacing to shape the poem on the page. There are no sentences in this poem, only fragments, utterances sharp with emotion. Seven of the nine stanzas are like the three shown above, words parsed out over three lines per stanza. However, the remaining two stanzas consist of only one line each, both extremely short in contrast with the rest of the poem. This noticeable difference makes the lines stand out—they scream be read together: “The problem   Almighty // you.”

In addition, another characteristic of this first poem is the number of biblical references and allusions, which are braided throughout the stanzas. The final stanza of the first poem demonstrates how Childress weaves allusions into these poems such that knowledge of the allusion is not necessary in order to appreciate the poem:

spell out our own failings Holy One           about the women
who have not shame                              Split open the hazelnut under
our ribs               Let there be enough to go around                   and around

Here, the stanza stands on its own, with “the hazelnut under / our ribs” as a possible reference to the heart, and speaker therefore prays that there may be enough love-forgiveness-grace “to go around.” And the hazelnut could also be an allusion to the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich and her Revelations of Divine Love, which stress compassion, and include her famous vision of the hazelnut placed in the palm of her hand: in a nutshell, God in all things; therefore, all will be well. Such a muted proclamation dangles uncomfortably after the fractured litany of witness, leaving the reader with perhaps a feeling of hope, perhaps a feeling of despair-abandonment, perhaps both.

Julian of Norwich is not the only historical woman-writer that inspires Childress. English noblewoman Mary Sidney, contemporary of Shakespeare and celebrated poet, also moves Childress to verse. The poem “The Hyssop Tub,” an ekphrasticpoem comprised of seven sonnets, is a response-exploration of one of the psalms in the Sidney Psalter, which is a series of poems based on the Psalms and co-authored by Mary Sidney. “The Hyssop Tub” is a beautiful poem—and an ambitious one because of the layered-ness of its ekphrasis:

Firstly, it is a meditation and exploration on Sidney’s “Psalm 51, Miserer mei Deus,” the fourth stanza of which serves as the epigraph to Childress’ sonnet sequence. Hyssop is a biblical herb used in cleansing and purification rituals and each sonnet explores purging, clarifying, cleaning, in some way, whether metaphorically, such as in the first sonnet in which the speaker tells of purging her very being—“I’ll erase myself if you want me to”—to literally, such as in the last sonnet in which the speaker is standing in a rainstorm.

Secondly, some of the sonnets are mediations on other works of art, such as the second sonnet in the sequence. Here we have the speaker talking to Degas’ about his painting Le Tub:

II.

 Let them have their dancers. I’m in love with the woman in Le Tub,

her russet sponge and russet hair. Russet jar delicate as a teapot, filled,

I want to imagine, with the oils of gardenia, some flowers from the family

of Rubiaceae, not the bitter leaves of Labiatae. She is a careful

woman, russet yarn between her needles on the counter. You, too,

loved her, I can tell. It would have been easy with each hatchmark to deliquesce

her body with water but you did not give a glistening—you gave the tub,

simple iron sphere, opening up and out, and the sempiternal

turning of her head, her body dry, ginger-ashen, like someone crouching

to a kiss a new land, say Praise be, saying I believed, and the crepuscular small

of her back knows how what is poured over her shoulders from the mouth

of splotched pitcher will rivulet. I see the hairbrush within reach, the towel.

Later, semi-submerged in bronze she practices the Portuguese she knows,

grips an instep, the tub’s rim, O Degas. She asks over and again Como ser limpo?

While the speaker begins the sonnet sequence with an offer to erase herself, and in this second sonnet asks how to be clean?, the four sonnets that follow present different artistic reflections to answer the question how to be clean? After flowing through these four reflections of cleansing, purification, and grace, we find in the last sonnet that the speaker herself has become an agent of cleansing: “I am not the blue jay / at all / I am / the rain.” This movement through the sonnet sequence, the poem’s careful language, its smart and ambitious engagement with visual and literary art, and so much more, make “The Hyssop Tub” an exceptional poem.

Cleansing and water are not uncommon elements in the Entering the House of Awe. The idea is introduced in a literal sense in the second poem of the book, “The Green Spider,” in which the speaker is small green spider that a woman sees while she’s taking a shower. This poem is a witness poem. The spider, who through its presence intends to distract the woman from things she might be thinking of, were she not distracted by a spider. The spider lists such thoughts for the reader, for example:

… the seven children
in Madagascar whose parents were taken with no
explanation, the children walking each day
past the prison until one them lobbed
a stolen fish through the bars for his mother, for which
he was shot: once in the hip and once in the ear. …

“The Green Spider” is also an example of the unusual point-of-view found in a good number of the poems in the book: the second-person point of view, in which the “you” is not explicitly identified, drives most poems in the first section, as well as a few poems in the other sections. In the above poem, as well as in most of the other poems that employ this point-of-view ( e.g., “Halfway to the Jesse James Wax Museum” and “Architecture of an Apology,” which is printed in its entirety at the end of this post), it’s safe to assume that the “you” is the speaker speaking to herself either directly, or in the case of “The Green Spider,” through the voice of spider. A prolonged stay in the second person, poem after poem, is difficult to pull off without the poems feeling forced or coming across as self-conscious. That Childress is able to do so successfully is to her credit.

“The Green Spider” is also another example of Childress’ inventiveness with form, with all lines flush to the right. In addition to the free-verse forms illustrated by “The Green Spider” and “What’s Done,” and the sonnet form mentioned earlier, Childress works in the form of prose poems as well. One example is “Chloé Phones after Three Weeks Working at the Home.” It is another witness poem, a telephone conversation between the speaker and a woman name Chloé about Chloé’s job at “the home.” Here is a snippet from the middle of the poem, in which Chloé is speaking right up until the last line displayed below, when the “I” then becomes ambiguous. It could still be Chloé speaking, but it could also be the speaker:

                                                                … Madison who can’t bathe by herself
having been raped by her stepfather    How about  “That’s nuts”    No      no good
“Insane”  Worse    “Whacky”  Well    then scalded in a bath    when  he  panicked
scrubbing at the spread of blood between her legs     I’ve  got  it        “That’s wild”
Another Maddy-ism  she says  is I already did a shitloaf of spelling words     and
There’s a shitloaf of dishes   ain’t there  That’s wild  she tries   that’s wild      It’ll
work  she says but isn’t satisfied  I can tell   It’s the way she laughs    hot   stippled

But not all is heavy with witness in this volume of poetry. There is some levity too, such as “Love, Anonymous,” a narrative poem about a teenager sending love notes to herself under the guise of a secret admirer. Another example of a lighter poem, also narrative, is “All Hallow Even,” in which the speaker is speaking to her lover about the night he first told her he loved her. They were at a Halloween party:

The night most of America snapped on
black capes and gauzy era-imitation dresses, our hostess
bearing her torso-length cleavage in a jumpsuit the color

of spinach tortilla, you tell me you love me. …

The poem continues with forays into humor, such as when the speaker sees her lover dance for the first time:

—but when you danced,

sharper than Brando in the only suit you owned, it was the outlandish

waggle of your neck, your eyes snapping open

like bean pods,your palms shimmying up as if to request

what you cannot sound out perdón, pelo, pequeñina …

As you can see, the above snippet starts in the middle of a sentence and goes on for four lines and doesn’t end—still, we’re in that same sentence. Childress is a master of extended syntax. The sentence that contains the above line spans over 6 stanzas, with punctuation and well-crafted phrases keeping the reader on track. Another example of her use of complex sentence structure is the narrative poem “After Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing:” 

After Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing 

He received the book you sent about Gettysburg and though he does not
tell you this you know he'll read most of it before bedtime and on the phone

he is grateful, he recalls the family trip to Antietam and how you,
nine years old, dropped your ice cream cone on someone's grave,

but it's your mother who tells you he's forgotten what to feed the hummingbirds
and all week long he's called your sister by your name though this

is not the worst of it: the doctor says it's like a bruise on the brain
and while the aphasia and disorientation will diminish,some things

may be lost forever. What's great, your father tells you, is that he can't
remember what's lost. It's that old bliss they tell you about, he says,

not knowing what you don't know you knew. After you hang up, you do not
cry like you thought you might, instead you get tangled in something

like prayer: what may be gone from him is last summer's drive to Tennessee,
hiking through white pine to the top of a mist-hung hill or perhaps

the paddy in Vietnam where a bullet struck his hip and flares smoked red
over the coming boats or perhaps the first time he touched your mother, or Hebrew,

or the color wheel, Star Wars, your brother's birth, the day he pulled
the mower over his foot, stuck in a gopher hole, toes-up. If last week God

held your father's body those twelve unconscious feet, you figure it's your job
to ask which things are shucked from his mind: your mouth, however,

has become a wide place, your tongue a useless oar, and looking down you see
your hands are the real supplicants, palms up, as if holding cantaloupe on your lap,

and when you fall asleep you dream a stretch of dandelions, some
whispering out thistle-tops in a pattern like rain, some smudging

across your skin that dewy, ocher language you cannot decipher.

"Your Father’s Fallen from the Roof and Not Broken a Thing” first published in IMAGE.

Notice that the first sentence spans over four stanzas, and is smartly followed by two relatively-shorter sentences. The above poem revels in language and narrative. As with most of Childress’ poems, the reader is propelled through the poem via these longer lines and the energy of the sentence—its extended syntax. Through the “you” of the poem and the vivid, specific details, we are given an intimate look into the speaker, the father, their relationship with one another, that relationship a gateway to our relationship with them.

And such things are hallmarks of Childress’ poetry. The whole of Entering the House of Awe is nothing if it is not about relationship—honest engagement, a clear-eyed look at what it means to be human, which has encapsulated within it the need for forgiveness. Childress crafts poems with effective and exact language, layered meaning, and innovative form. When it comes to the form of the poem—the look of it on the page—Childress is adept in the use of white space, indentation, the arrangement of words and the absence of words. Indeed, the book opens with an emotional stuttering embodied in the form, the jagged heaving that results from extended cry, with the speaker addressing God about physical abuse and uncontrolled anger, a yearning for grace. And the book ends in a controlled sonnet form, grace unfolding in language, image, metaphor, beginnings found in surrender, with the speaker addressing cohabitants in Nature—stamen and bees—what I imagine Childress would call “fellow residents” in this house of awe.

__________

[a poem from Entering the House of Awe]

Architecture of an Apology

When you see each other again                              this time under the pretext
of an apology he wants to make     in a hallway       after the plenary speaker


his wife stands there trying not to look uncomfortable            which at the moment is
impossible and gets you  feeling sorrier for her than for yourself            a particular
accomplishment            considering inside your coat pocket     two fingers


pinch a  balled-up gum wrapper like it's your  cherry stone of a brain  and this means
you're each sorry for something now      you      for her and she for him and he for


what?                mislabeling love is what you're guessing though in the actual air his
           Sorry     doesn't carry like you'd imagined    the lam of a beefy helicopter
and of course      now that you're standing here and now that he's said his apology


you can't for the life of you figure how to respond     this gulch between your mouth
and the long tunnel      to his ticker           Me too isn't what you mean at all


and  I  forgive you       also sounds  wrong  though  it's closer to what    belongs
in the space he's cleared     between you                          What  you manage
         is Thank  you          the one thing left on that short  list of possibilities


but when he says I'm  just tired    of being  pissed off      it's not hard  to fill in
at you    and  you could gasp      like you'd been smacked but he     with more curls


and  paunch  than  you remember      is the one gathering  up a raw breath as though
            it feels right to say these things to the woman  he          didn't  marry
for which you have shouted  at the moon—God's good eye—so  many


thanks         and for whatever  reason       the whole sweet speech you prepared
this morning    as you brushed  your teeth      has started  to slip away


Words  just      drop  their napkins  on their plates    and saunter  out the house
so all you can do is nod dumbly  that      Certainly       Being pissed off is a waste
of energy                  What  it seems         is that  his apology  has made a strange


shape   of your throat    you're  guessing a triangle  with too much       susurration
say    Isosceles        and  now the tiny pellet of gum wrapper has lodged itself beneath


a fingernail     like the hard angles of your youthful  mistakes    his      and  yours
each    of us      so ridiculous     we thought the house we built of cones     would stand
in the forest forever and by now    you're  ready to leave but can't  quite  make it


happen     unsure  how  to construct     a salutation for him or his wife       who was also
     your  friend  once         and  who    this whole time  has been inspecting the wiry flex
of her wrist       one  hand  rotating  back and forth like the smallest       nodding head


“Architecture of an Apology” first published in the Tampa Review

************** 

All poems printed or quoted in this post © Susanna Childress Entering the House of Awe (New Issues Press, 2011)

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Nancy Chen Long works at Indiana University and lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. At this time (September 2012), you'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Noctua Review, RHINO, Imitation Fruit, The Louisville Review, The Golden Key, Roanoke Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.