Poetry

The Weekly Wrap: June 30-July 6

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“You are never alone with a poet in your pocket.”

John Adams, who spent hours on horseback during the American fight for independence, found pleasant diversion in poetry he read along the way. Maybe it’s a sign of age but I’ve come to find myself of a mind with Adams on this one. Currently, I’m reading through Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald. The Diary consists of 365 seven line poems, one for each day. They are devotional in character, and chronicle MacDonald’s honest struggle to love God as he would, and amazement that he is nevertheless loved.

I never made it through the Divine Comedy. In Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell offers poetic responses to Dante that inspire me to try again. And if you remember, I recently read a collection of poems by 95 year-old Luci Shaw. I wonder if writing poetry is a key to a long life. At very least, poems do remind us of our shared human experience, that we are not alone, as Adams observed.

Five Articles Worth Reading

I love a good mystery. There are classic writers I love. The question is finding new ones. “4 Great Fictional Detectives” gave me some good ideas of new writers to explore.

There is a loneliness epidemic, and sometimes poems are not enough! In “Hungry for Connection: Addressing Loneliness Through the Library” I learned how librarians across the country are helping people find the opportunity for connection.

Barnes & Noble, which has experienced a major turnaround under CEO James Daunt has just rescued a venerable Denver institution, The Tattered Cover, whose parent company is in bankruptcy proceedings. “Tattered Cover will chart its own course, says Barnes & Noble CEO on bookstore’s sale” details Daunt’s recent visit to the store, his commitment to maintain the Tattered Cover name and ethos while providing the resources “to figure out how it becomes Tattered Cover again.”

Richard Hughes Gibson argues in “The New Verbal Economy” that reports of the death of the writer with the advent of generative AI are greatly exaggerated. The technology needs the creativity of human writers to continue to develop. Still, I wonder whether we will find a way in this new economy to reward human writers. And as AI improves, will people still prefer the works of humans?

I love keeping up with science writing. One way I do that is to subscribe to the daily newsletter of Nature. On many Fridays, Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks recently published. Here is this week’s: “Blooming plants and sunken cities, Books in brief.”

Quote of the Week

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose birthday we marked on July 4th, made this pithy observation:

“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”

How we could use more people like this!

Miscellaneous Musings

I’ve been reading The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams. She offers a fascinating study of reading practices in the 1700s. One tip: elocution was considered a valued skill! I wonder what a future cultural historian might write about reading practices in our century.

Here’s a reviewer’s dilemma. I love losing myself in a long book, but it also takes longer to finish such books. The best I’ve been able to figure out is to have several books going, including a mix of shorter ones.

I’ve just started Jessica Hooten Wilson’s annotated edition of an unfinished novel by Flannery O’Connor, Why Do The Heathen Rage? Apparently, O’Connor never saw how the story could come together, including how to organize the pieces of it. It seems that Jessica Hooten Wilson has taken on quite a challenge, one other scholars have passed up. I look forward to seeing how she does. But from the little I’ve read, it’s pure Flannery O’Connor!

Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for this week!

Past editions of The Weekly Wrap may be accessed under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: Reversing Entropy

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Cover image of "Reversing Empathy" by Luci Shaw

Reversing Entropy, Luci Shaw. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640608702), 2024.

Summary: Poems that address the decay in the physical world and how human creativity and transcendent hope reverses entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics observes that the amount of disorder in any physical system will increase over time. Only the introduction of energy can counter the increase of disorder and decay. Luci Shaw, at 95, is a keen observer of the physical world as well as the changes we experience in our own bodies and much of this shows up in the poetry in this collection.

One of the delights is that Shaw observes what we often see only in passing. She celebrates the first star at night visible through her skylight. She notices the dance of the lichens. Many of her poems chronicle the drives she and her husband take. She observes the entropy of the autumn, the fall of gingko leaves, the single leaf pinned to the windshield.

Human creativity in music, the arts, writing and other ways help reverse the entropy in our human communities. Some of her poems share her creative process “when the words begin to arrive.” She likens poetry to laundering and describes filling the “fresh, clean page.”

Part three of the collection includes several exquisite poems on Mary and the incarnation, including one poem on “Mary’s sword.” Part four include more poems on the title theme. She captures, in “Energy Entropy” the dance between these two in all of our existence: “Pair the antonyms/energy and entropy,/unusual partners/twinned in the making of love,/to join with all the unmaking/and remaking within/the fluid universe.”

The title poem of the fifth part is “Love in a Time of Plague,’ and captures the healing of what was lost when we could unmask, and behold, and converse with each other. The sixth part deals with the ultimate expression of entropy, death. Vulnerably, she recounts both her brother’s failings, and of speaking and listening over the phone as he breathes his last, and the unfolding of grief. And here, she leans into the ultimate reversing of entropy, the Great Dance of heaven, the dawn of Light, the renewal of all that is only dimly foreshadowed in the creation and our own efforts to forestall entropy.

Shaw reminds us of the wonder of our lives in our world amid entropy’s relentless incursion. Her daily celebration of the quotidian beauties around us rolls entropy back, at least a bit. And her hope in the “deeper magic,” as C.S. Lewis would express it, stakes out a claim to the final reversal of entropy for which we all long. And what a gift to us that she wrote these poems around her 95th year!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Mountain Offerings

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Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen. Montpelier, VT: Rootstock Publishing, 2024.

Summary: A chapbook of narrative verse capturing memories of childhood, summer vacations in the mountains, growing love, parenting, and loss.

It is a wonderful thing when a writer’s work draws us into a different world than our own and yet evokes analogue memories in our own lives. That’s what I found happening repeatedly in this chapbook of poems by Amy Allen, a freelance editor and writer from Vermont.

We are invited into the world of Vermont, a state I’ve only driven through. One of her early poems even celebrates folk singer Noah Kahan’s unofficial anthem (I had to Google it!) for Vermont and the weird love we can have for our home state–maybe not so weird. She celebrates both its obvious and subtler beauties in “Pilgrimage.” There are the memories of arriving at a summer cabin in June, with all the summer ahead, and early winter sunsets over Lake Champlain after which “The stars shine brightest/on the coldest of days.”

We have a young couple sharing a “Tiny House” in mud season or climbing a mountain together to the summit and a knowledge of each other forged “without ever touching.” In “Gathering,” the couple watches their daughter gather pine cones while studying one together. Later she finds he has left one on the bedstand as she slides under the covers next to him. A couple of poems remember what seems to have been their daughter in a serious medical emergency–a greenhouse that gave respite and the implied understandings in family lounges. “Daughter of Mine” captures the moment one realizes the transition of the daughter toward adulthood, toward being her own unique person, a marvel and a mystery.

Allen traces the seasons of life, including the cleaning out of a parent’s house in “My Mother’s Flowers.” She describes “Heavy-lidded casserole dishes/cookbooks with margin notes/penciled in her cursive/framed photos of ourselves/leather handbags we’d given her on birthdays/three unopened jars of her face cream/I wondered when I’d forget that smell.” Many of us, if we reached a certain age, carry memories like this.

Sure, these poems evoke memories from childhood summers to flirtations and deepening loves, to the joys and heartbreaking moments of parenthood. She calls to mind those special places of our lives. More than this, she reminds me, in the words of Mary Oliver of our “one wild and precious life.” In most of the poems we remember analogues from our own lives, but in “Hope is a Voice” she reminded us of our shared experience of the dark days of January 2021 and the moment a young woman in a yellow coat invited us to step toward the light as she reminded us of “the hill we must climb.” In Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen reminds us in times of innocence, wonder, sadness, intimacy, and hope of all that is precious in our passing lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.

Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, Gene Andrew Jarrett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Summary: Perhaps the definitive biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African writers to achieve fame for his poetry and other writings.

On the sesquicentennial of the birth of Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. 1872), Princeton University published this extensively researched biography of a man who, arguably was one of the first great African-American poets and writers. Born of former slaves, including an alcoholic father who soon divorced his mother Mathilda, he was able to enroll in Dayton’s top high school when few African-Americans achieved more than an eighth grade education. A classmate of Orville Wright, being educated in a classically-oriented curriculum, he began writing, teaming up on several publishing efforts with Wright.

Dunbar gained the attention of influential men like James Whitcomb Riley and Frederick Douglas early on, giving him connections, the opportunities to read his poetry, and reviewing his books. This was a mixed blessing. Fellow Ohioan William Dean Howells praised an early collection of his poetry, bringing him wider notice of the literary public but also imposing the first of the “cages” Jarrett depicts that would trouble his brief, yet brilliant career.

Dialect poetry. Howells especially praised his dialect poetry, often around scenes of southern life pre- and post-Emancipation in the language and idioms people supposed Blacks to use. Throughout his career Dunbar composed poems both in formal English and dialect, the latter to satisfy the demand of the public. This also represented a larger struggle against the racial stereotypes that both shaped public taste and yet Dunbar strove to transcend. He wanted to be known simply as a great poet, not as a Black poet.

Poverty. While publishing his first collections and trying to cultivate connections who would help publicize his work, Dunbar struggled with lowly jobs such as an elevator operator in Dayton, earning a meager $4 a week while trying to help his mother. Poverty would be a cage against which he would struggle, shaping his efforts both in writing prodigiously for papers, periodicals, several musicals, one of the early Black librettists, as well as his book publishing efforts. This also necessitated relentless travel to readings, all while working at the Library of Congress, efforts detrimental to his health.

Alcoholism. Like his father, Dunbar drank increasingly throughout his life. On the one hand, it seemed to facilitate his composing, as when he turned out a school song for Tuskegee Institute on short notice and, increasingly hampered his readings when he turned up drunk. It also released violent tendencies exacerbating problems in an already troubled marriage.

A difficult marriage. Fellow writer Alice Ruth Moore came to his notice in a magazine article and they began writing, developing a deepening bond long before they met. At this time, as throughout his life, Dunbar had flirtations (and perhaps more) with a number of other woman. For this reason, she was slow to engage, and then to set a date for a wedding. Neither her parents nor Mathilda would give the couple their blessing (and Mathilda would occupy an unhealthy place in their eventual marriage). Jarrett covers at length Dunbar’s rape of Alice (when inebriated) during their engagement. Apparently she had physical injuries requiring medical attention and leave from work. It nearly broke the engagement. After several years of marriage, there was another violent incident, leading to permanent separation (though not divorce) during which she refused to respond to his attempts to apologize and reconcile. Dunbar, in declining health, purchased a home in Dayton. living with his mother.

Tuberculosis. Through most of his adult life, Dunbar was in frail health, frequently laid low by “colds” that signaled something more. Eventually, it became clear he was sick with what was then called “consumption” and is now known as tuberculosis. During his life, before the age of antibiotics, there wasn’t a cure. Dunbar even rationalized drinking as curative. A trip to Colorado brought a remission, but after his break with Alice, his condition worsened. All he could do was read and write. The end came in February of 1906, when he was but 33 years of age. He was buried in a different part of the same cemetery where his father was buried.

Jarrett not only covers the “cages” of Dunbar’s life but also how the caged bird sang. He traces his literary career, citing a number of poems. He traces Dunbar’s transition to writing several moderately successful novels as well as the previously mentioned musical collaborations. One wonders what Dunbar would have done had he lived longer or not faced the constraints he had. Yet were these constraints the very thing that drove and inspired Dunbar?

As a fellow Ohioan, I knew of Dunbar but welcome what is probably the definitive biography on Dunbar. Jarrett confirmed to me the extent of Dunbar’s greatness. He also confirmed me in his recognition of his and my favorite Dunbar poem, “We Wear the Mask,” and arguably one of his greatest, with which I will close:

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,
  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
  This debt we pay to human guile;
  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
  And mouth with myriad subtleties.
  Why should the world be over-wise,
  In counting all our tears and sighs?
  Nay, let them only see us, while
        We wear the mask.
  We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
  To thee from tortured souls arise.
  We sing, but oh the clay is vile
  Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
  But let the world dream otherwise,
        We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence. Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask.” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, ) via Poetry Foundation

Review: Now I Lay Me Down to Fight

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Now I Lay Me Down to Fight, Katy Bowser Hutson (Foreword by Tish Harrison Warren). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: Poems and essays tracing one woman’s cancer journey and how she encountered God amid the brokenness of her body.

You are going about your life. Attending a writers workshop. Caring for children. Looking forward to the return of a husband who has been on the road. Then you notice alarming symptoms. And the world turns over in a day as you learn you have inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly deadly form of breast cancer. Within a week you’ve begun chemotherapy.

This, in outline is the beginning of Katy Bowser Hutson’s breast cancer journey. A poet, Bowser invites us into her journey through short essays and poems. A survivor, she bears scars of body and spirit from peripheral neuropathy to the ever present possibility of recurrence.

Her treatment involved intensive chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation. Her poems take us through the fatigue of chemotherapy in which you fight by resting and letting the chemo kill. She grieves the loss of hair. Hutson writes that she will “cipher meaning/Siphoning liquid beauty that seeps from the edges/Into a tiny vial.” Poetry is her resistance. She acknowledges the ugliness of the treatment and the strange paradox that this may give her her life. She thanks God for everything from herceptin to those who surround her with love while her body is being devastated. In “Potty Mouth” she vents against all the indignities of a digestive tract wracked by chemo.

She takes us through her process of coming to terms with the loss of the breasts that caught the eyes of boys and nursed her children. She gives us a glimpse of her thoughts on the eve of surgery and after recovery. At times, all she can do is send words “running across the page.” Amid it all she notes that a benefit of cancer is that people tell you they are glad you’re alive. They don’t usually do that.

Then radiation. Daily bursts of radiation five days a week for six weeks. Like sunburn, reddening, inflaming, and blistering skin and introducing a new type of fatigue. A daily routine with caring people inflicting a new form of hurt…until its over and you are really done with treatment, nine or so months after you began. And then another year for your body to recover to a new normal. And then the finish line moves for her as she has ovaries removed to suppress the estrogen that feeds her cancer.

She writes of her struggles with God and her sense that God comes near the broken and brokenhearted. She describes the living of a kind of death to know resurrection. Throughout she renders honestly both the struggle with what she is facing and the place of surrender to which she comes.

I am the husband of a fourteen year survivor of a different form of breast cancer. While no two cancers or cancer journeys are the same, there was so much that rang true. My wife’s treatment process was similar to Katy’s: chemo, surgery, radiation. I relived my wife’s journey as I read, and perhaps it is good not to forget. She captures the devastation cancer treatment wreaks upon the body. The old saw is that “to kill cancer you need to mostly kill the rest of you.” She captures the duration of treatment that most who haven’t been through it don’t understand. She expresses the ups and downs of spiritual life and the exhaustion that says “all I want to do is rest” and says that is OK. All this in a little book of 86 pages.

This is a book that helps someone going through treatment to know he or she is not alone. It helps caregivers understand what those they love are going through. But the group this book may be especially helpful for are those who have a friend who has received a cancer diagnosis and they have not known someone close to them with cancer. Katy Bowser Hutson helps readers wrestle with the mortal danger of cancer and the bodily indignities of treatment and the “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” that is the spiritual journey of many.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Christian Poetry in America Since 1940

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Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, Edited by Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2022.

Summary: An anthology of poetry written by a wide variety of poets who identify as Christian, born between 1940 and 1989.

When I first saw the title of this work, I felt myself cringe. Would this be the schlocky Hallmark poetry with a Christian veneer or something more substantial? I took the chance because Paraclete Press has come to represent intellectual and aesthetic quality in the publications I’ve received from them. I was not disappointed and in the process discovered a wide range of poets, many of whom have won distinguished literary awards or even served as Poet Laureates. The anthology includes poets born between 1940 and 1989, which excludes two of the more well-known poets we may think of–Luci Shaw and Wendell Berry.

What I found instead of saccharine-sweet pretty works were the honest probing of people who have thought deeply about both faith and life. For example Andrew Hudgins (from Ohio State, notes a fellow Buckeye) writes about “Praying Drunk” and stumbling through a rubric that will be familiar to some of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, if he is able to remain awake. Franz Wright opens his poem “Baptism” writing “That insane asshole is dead / I drowned him / and he’s not coming back. Look / he has a new name / a new life….” “Blessings” by Jay Parini writes not only of picking dandelion greens and small potatoes and cliff diving with friends, but also of lying naked with his love. A blessing indeed but adult stuff, where a Christ-informed vision meets the real stuff of human life. We have Christian Wiman’s “After The Diagnosis,” written after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis (although it appears that he is in remission as of this writing), reflects on how change comes into our lives.

The poetry comes in a variety of forms from sonnet to free verse to Shane McCrae’s “visceral, fractured lines.” Few are longer than a page. One of the shorter poems I liked was Marilyn Nelson’s “Incomplete Renunciation,” which asks for the American dream house, concluding “And let it pass / through the eye of a needle.” Dana Gioia’s “Seven Deadly Sins” speaks dismissively in the voice of Pride of the other six sins. Scott Cairns “Possible Answers to Prayer” considers how God may regard some of the things for which we pray and the places of the heart from which we pray.

Each poet is introduced with a one page or so literary biography considering both the character of their work and the awards and recognitions that work has received. The work includes acknowledgements of the sources of each work and an index of titles as well as an introductory essay by one of the editors, Micah Mattox.

This work demonstrated to me that, contrary to the voices decrying the banality of Christians in the arts, that there are accomplished writers doing good work. For those like myself who want to get more poetry in their lives, including poetry written through the eyes of faith, this book is a wonderful gateway that both stands on its own and introduces us to writers whose work we may want to explore more deeply.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.