This post was first published at The
Master’s Artist.
I
think of Annie Dillard, and I think of
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her 1974 work
on nature and life that won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction when the author was
29. Or I think of An American Childhood (1987). Or The Writing Life (1989). Or even
Holy the Firm (1977), a book Frederick
Beuchner loved. In her writing, Dillard spoke for a generation, and beyond.
What
I don’t think of is Tickets for a Prayer Wheel: Poems, published in
1974 but largely overshadowed by Pilgrim.
It was republished in 1988, and then again in 2002. Other than those by famous
poets, few poetry books continue to be published over a three-decade period.
But then, this one is by Annie Dillard.
I
have the 2002 edition, published by Wesleyan University Press. I bought it a
bookstore; I didn’t know that she had published poetry, and in fact she
published this volume of poems before she published anything else.
She
writes about the same things she writes about in her non-fiction: science,
nature, eternity, time, seasons, holidays. She brings the same eye, and the
same heart, that she brings to her other writing. The poems are simple, often
almost stark, words and ideas cut with precision and insight. Here is her poem
“Christmas:”
Trees
that have loved
in
silence, kiss,
crashing;
the Douglas firs lean
low
to the brittle embrace
of
a lodgepole pine.
In
cities at night
tin
canisters eat
their
cookies; the bed;
asleep,
tossing,
brushes
it curtain of bead.
My
wristwatch grows
obscurely,
sun-
flower
big. Across
America,
cameras gaze,
astonished,
into the glass.
This
is the hour
God
loosens and empties.
Rushing,
consciousness comes
unbidden,
gasping,
and
memory, wisdom, grace.
Birds
come running;
the
curtains moan.
Dolls
in the hospital
with
brains of coral
jerk,
breathe and are born.
“This
is the hour,” she writes, “God loosens and empties. / Rushing, consciousness
comes / unbidden, gasping, / and memory, wisdom, grace.” What a startling, and
perfect, description of Christmas.
Most
of the poems are about this length; the title poem is considerably longer – 12
pages – and concludes the volume. It is a kind of play about prayer, about
Jesus and the church fathers, a consideration of and reflection on what prayer
means.
Dillard
is not a “Christian poet,” but she is a poet, and a writer, who speaks of
spiritual and Christian things.
Related:
Last
year, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel was
used as the source of prompts for a Tweetspeak Poetry jam on Twitter. You can
see the three sets of poems developed from the jam here:
Photograph by Petr Kratockvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
