The Poetry of Personal Loss

This article was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

The death of any close friend or loved one is a wrenching, dislocating experience. The knowns disappear, replaced by unknowns. Simple things – a regular afternoon visit, the way the dinner table is set, a shared piece of music – suddenly disappear or become painful reminders. For Christians, the loss is tempered by the knowledge and hope of heaven, but the loss and absence is no less great.

When one loses a parent, a number of transitions begin, some immediately. Some say the loss of a parent is when you truly become an adult. Death sets certain processes in motion – legal processes, family processes, personal processes. If there is a surviving parent, that relationship will change as well. Things can both ravel and unravel, and at the same time.

It is those ideas underlying the death of parent that inform After the Ark: Poems by Luke Johnson. Johnson, whose poems have appeared in such publications as The New York Quarterly and Best Young Poets and who’s received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Atlantic Monthly, lost his mother to cancer when she was 54. Both of his parents were ministers, and so faith plays through these poems as well, a faith that simultaneously questions and accepts.

Here’s the opening poem in the collection, “Moving Day:”

All that was left were the boxes of sermons

collected in her study, thirty years

of readings and reflections, prayers ready

to be gathered and stored away.

I could feel the weight of her words

as I carried the stack of boxes, unsorted,

to my car. With her body of work

tucked into my mid-sized trunk, I returned

for her size-five boots in the crux

of the doorway, dropped them in the backseat.

The breeze stroked the leaves above me,

Their rustling like a flock of small birds

Taking flight, perhaps frightened

By the muffled click of the trunk’s latch.

It’s a fine introductory poem for the collection, combining professional and personal elements of his mother’s life – the sermons and the size-five boots, the sermons tucked carefully into the trunk and the boots dropped in the backseat. While he recognizes it is the sermons that are the important things, the products of her mind and faith, it is the boots that truly bring home the magnitude of the loss he’s feeling, and he casually drops them in the backseat as if to deny the pain.

All of these poems are about the changes in relationships – with his father, his brother, even his dead mother, and perhaps most of all with himself. They are moving poems, thoughtful and pondering, questioning but always coming back to a center. And they speak much about the importance of faith in a time of loss.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Hope

This article was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

Every life has its dark times. They may be personal – death of a loved one, depression, serious illness, loss of a job, bankruptcy, cruelty and humiliation at the hands of another. They may be universal – war, oppression, economic upheaval. Regardless, the dark times can be terrifying, especially when no measure exists for how bad they are, how long they will last, or if the light will ever return.

For Christians, dark times can test and perhaps even overwhelm our faith. God allows my wife to die of cancer? God wants my business to go down the tubes? My career destroyed? My child to be permanently ill? This is living the victorious life? Yes, I know it’s supposed to be all well with my soul, but this is awful. Take the pain away. Please.

Poet Sydney Lea has spent a lifetime considering the dark and light times of a life, and all the things that can challenge faith. He’s published 10 volumes of poetry, been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, seen his poems published in The New Yorker, the Atlantic and some of the most prestigious literary reviews. He’s received the fellowships, he founded the New England Review and served as editor for 20 years, and taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan and Middlebury College. He’s the current poet laureate of Vermont.

 His career has been successful by any measure.

And yet he’s known pain, and dark times, and he’s held fast to his faith. And he’s written what I can only call the poetry of hope, wonderful poems previously published and now assembled as Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems. I discovered this volume because I read D.S. Martin’s blog, Kingdom Poets. Martin serves as the editor of the Wipf and Stock Publishers Poiema Poetry series, and a recent volume is this collection of poems by Lea.

These are longish poems, some stretching to three pages. They tell stories about family and friends, and self. They are about aging and death, and other senseless things.

I could read these poems all day. Repeatedly. I find new things with each reading. Most importantly, I find faith; over and over again I find faith.

In “Ghost Pain,” Lea describes a Christmas service; it’s clear that most of those attending are staring mortality in the face.

…It’s minus ten degrees out there,

for the love of Christ,

and it seems above all so safe inside,

safer even than home.

It seems home.

We’ve lit the half-blighted sprice by the road,

chanted our way through a tone-deaf carol,

repaired to our coffee and small talk.

Brian just wheeled in Joan.

We wish them all the cheer that humans can,

inquire how the leg is,

now that it’s gone.

Is there ghost pain?

Brave Joan and Brian kindle like matches…

Other friends are too sick to come; some have already died.

…A dear friend down south has gone;

his church’s prayer chain couldn’t hold him.

Not this time. People die…

But in this midst of this suffering and death, Lea still finds hope:

The girl sang well, enough to bring tears.

A small voice got big, rose over the pain.

And thus did Mary trudge in,

and Joan roll in on her chair,

and Red and Agnes and Willie figure thus in our prayers,

and the only miracle for this lonely minute:

we were inside,

even those who weren’t, who aren’t, who can’t be.

And the wind that blows no good—

it’s outside.

And the cookies are good, and the coffee.

By God aren’t they good?

I’ve had those cookies, too, and the coffee, and Lea is exactly right: by God they are good.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Words like Cut Jewels

This article is an updated version of the one first published at The Master’s Artist.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) achieved poetic fame in 1896 with the publication of 63 poems in a volume entitled A Shropshire Lad. His next volume of poetry, Last Poems, was published in 1922. Two additional posthumous collections were published by his brother Laurence.

His career didn’t start on an auspicious note. He failed to graduate with honors from Oxford, which denied an immediate academic career. And so he trained for the Civil Service, passing the examination and becoming a minor clerk in the U.K. Patent office from 1882 to 1892.

But during these years he maintained his love for classical scholarship. He continued his studies in his spare time and published articles in scholarly journals. In 1892 he became a professor of Latin at University College, London; in 1911 he joined the faculty at Cambridge.

His poetic output, while comparatively small, has an enormous impact, influencing two generations of poets and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, among others. On the fictional influence side, Housman was the favorite poet of Inspector Morse in the BBC mystery series.

By the time I was in high school, Housman was enshrined in the literary canon, firmly placed in the Late Victorian/Edwardian section of textbooks and anthologies. It was in such a high school textbook that I first met his poetry, with a poem taken from A Shropshire Lad:

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut.

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The Fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Many of Housman’s poems reflect the influence or inspiration of Scottish ballads, songs and even aphorisms. He wrote about love, both requited and unrequited; soldiers (one can see the echoes of Housman in the World War I poets like Owen and Rupert Brooke; homesickness; and his love of Shropshire.

And he wrote about memory and death.

His poems are carefully cut and chiseled, honed and polished like fine jewels. They are full of what we might call “poetic lines,” memorable words and phrases and ideas that reflect the beauty of the language and a rather intense emotion in the poet.

Poem 54 (from A Shropshire Lad)

With rue my heart is laden

   For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

   And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

   The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

   In fields where roses fade.

Photograph: A view of the Shropshire countryside.

The Poems of Padraig Daly

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

Last fall, I discussed the poems of R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), an Anglican minister in Wales whose poetry reflected his faith, his Welsh nationalism, and his love for rural life. Taking a short trip across the Irish Sea to Dublin, one finds a contemporary Irish poet who has often been compared To Thomas – Padraig Daly (1943- ).

Daly is an Augustinian priest in the Dublin parish of Ballyhoden. He’s published several poetry collections and translations from poets writing in Irish and the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti. In his own poetry, and especially The Last Dreamers: New and Selected Poems, the reader sees the similarities to Thomas, but also sees something that is uniquely Daly’s.

In these poems, Daly is focused on faith and how it is expressed, in the importance of daily life (be it in Ireland or Italy), in rituals, in loving and comforting, in prayer. The poems are wrapped in simplicity, but they are as deep as they are simple. Consider the poem “Errand:”

Carrying his knapsack,

He shuffled out in his boots

To where the stars hung burning.

The winds of space assailed him.

He was a speck

Smaller than a sootflake.

Dejected by vastness,

He wrapped himself in himself,

Hugging his own warmth;

Till the immense God,

Waking from his dream,

Brushed time and distances aside.

Daly paints a picture here, and you think you understand it on the first reading, until you read it again to find the meaning may actually be something different. So who is carrying the knapsack? And what’s in it? Assume it is a man, and the shuffling implies an older man, who moves outside. If he sees the stars, then it must be night. He’s assailed by winds, finds himself a small speck, is dejected, and can o nothing but wrap “himself in himself,” hugging his own inadequate warmth. And then God wakes from a dream, and brushes “time and distances aside.”

Nothing else is said, but that last line implies something profound has happened. God transcends physical reality, and the man carrying the knapsack is changed.

All of the poems in The Last Dreamers are like that – deceivingly simple. A particular favorite is “Prayer:”

We gather at the river’s edge;

One by one in the darkness

We place our flames in the darkness.

We watch them drift,

Fragile, flickering,

Out to the unsleeping ocean.

We fear at first that they will sink;

But the water carries them past every hazard

As if it loved them.

It’s a beautiful image to liken prayer to flames, tiny flames in the overwhelming darkness. They are fragile, and they drift almost as if meaningless on the ocean’s surface. But they are carried past the hazards, “as if the water loved them.” And, of course, the water does love them.

The Last Dreamers is a moving, thought- and soul-provoking collection, inviting us to deepen our understanding and faith.

Photograph by Anne Lowe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Place

This is a revised version of the article that first appeared at The Master’s Artist.

Sunday nights have become evenings devoted to British television. My wife and I watch Downton Abbey, and this month it’s been followed by Sherlock. To say we’re hooked on both shows is not an overstatement, although I behave more like a normal fan while my wife, well, doesn’t. And in March comes the new American season of Call the Midwife.

The first season of this “Upstairs, Downstairs” type of production ended with the start of World War I; the second season started in 1916. We’re now in season four, and it’s the 1920s. While there are all sorts of plots and sub-plots (it’s a big, complicated story), the story always centers on the house, which, as the house of an earl should be, is huge. The idea of place is important in this story, because the place is changing, as are the people and the times they live in. The old order is giving way to the new, although the new is still largely unknown.

Poet Patrick Hicks, who teaches creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, knows about the importance of place. He has an entire book of poem about place, and the place is London. This London is a collection of 47 poems, almost all about London (the handful that aren’t directly about the city are inspired by London). Hicks loves the city, but it’s not a heedless, careless kind of love. It’s a love that sees all of what the city is, what is has been, and where it might be going.

The collection is not chronological but the poems do travel in time. We stand with Boudicca as she revenges her people with the sack of Londinium; we’re with Shakespeare at the Globe Theater and the crowd at a hanging at Tyburn; we experience the fire of 1666 and we see the boys off for France at Charing Cross Station, and I’m reminded of scenes from Downton Abbey:

Seeing the Great War at Charing Cross Station

It is 2007 today, but it feels more like 1917.

Squinting through a kaleidoscope of history,

an army is here, rifles slung over their knapsacks,

they are spun toward no-man’s land.

These soldiers walk on healthy legs,

they have yet to be baptized by the oil of war.

Women cheer them off into a termite existence,

where they will become little wasps

caught in pus, and mud, and bones.

Kisses are blown,

like from that blonde over there,

the one next to Delice de France–a pastry shop

that sells croissants dripping with the blood of jam.

I watch her boyfriend, dressed in a trenchcoat,

step into a train, waving.

His hand is swallowed from view

and he is gone,

simply gone.

This sense of beauty and harsh reality pervades the poems. Hicks wanders the streets above the bones of the plague victims; he sees the grave of the unknown soldier at Westminster Abbey; he experiences the great stink of 11858 when the odor of the Thames nearly emptied the city. He sees the tawdriness of the strip shops in Soho, and stands with the Ripper in a Whitechapel alley.

He knows this city, and knows it well, but loves it almost in spite of itself. It’s a city that speaks at some deeper level, and he knows he finds himself there.

The Same is Different Every Day

A fisherman in Galway once told me

the sea is different every day,

and this truth baptizes me

whenever I navigate London.

If we learn a city well enough,

our ghost lives on every corner,

time becomes a pool,

and we submerge ourselves

again and again,

pearl-diving for streetsigns.

On might rivers of asphalt,

my restless feet hopscotch through time,

neither here, nor there.

We spent our last two vacations in London, and I’m already thinking of a return this year.

This London makes me want to go back, to see the British Museum with its all things un-British, and Tennyson’s (and now C.S. Lewis’s) stone in the Abbey, and the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, with all the famous bones buried below its floor stones. And I will take these poems with me, and read them aloud.

Photograph of Tower Bridge by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.