Rapturous rumination that’s sometimes dazzling and at other times, dimmed.
The impact of light on the human spirit is examined from religious, philosophical, and poetic perspectives in this debut literary meditation.
Babbitt (English/Hobart and William Smith Coll.), a co-editor of Seneca Review, arranges this text around a series of essays on books of hours—a genre of medieval Catholic illuminated manuscripts containing prayers, Bible excerpts, and sacred calendars. His loose-limbed commentaries explore the devotional content of the books and their tangible artistic features, including the feel of the parchment pages. (Babbitt also includes gorgeous color photographs of manuscript illustrations.) Threading through these essays is the story of Ireland’s Saint Columba, who illicitly copied a psalter belonging to St. Finnian—an ethical lapse that seemed blessed by God when Columba’s fingers started glowing with light. Babbitt takes this legend as a celebration of the divine union of light and language in “illuminated” religious literature. The essays, and especially their marginalia, wander into tangents, such as Babbitt’s boyhood memories of serving as a Catholic altar boy; the Norse god Odin’s quest for secret knowledge; and an anecdote about a British scholar who got so excited at deciphering an ancient Sumerian account of the Great Flood that he ecstatically tore off his clothes. Apart from a few lapses into academic jargon—“Scripture is the Lacanian symbolic. God is the Lacanian real”—these meanderings are erudite and engaging. Babbitt fleshes out the prose with separate poems. Some of these have religious themes, inspired by the canon of the books of hours. There are also landscapes, vignettes about birds and dogs, and intimate looks at relationships. Light imagery features prominently in most of them. The poetry is heavy going—dense with allusions, obscure asides, and untranslated Latin and Greek. Occasionally, as in “De Sanctissima Trinitate,” a stanza gels into a well-shaped poetic proposition, in this case about the mystery of the Holy Trinity: “some mysterious, reasoning thing / puts forth the mouldings / of its features from behind / an unreasoning mask.” More often, poems unfold in disjointed sprays of impressionistic imagery. In “All Along the Reservoir Road,” these form a coherent tableau to catch a traveler’s eye: “pile of bones, bag o’ bones / sun bleached scattered / progress is a winter / and no one planted the flowers growing in the lawn.” But sometimes, as in “Ad Laudes,” the jumble is so cryptic as to defy parsing: “something is a light—sun helps us / somewhere by taking / the eye’s capacity—quo ferrea primum / desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo— / he might even constitute / the abyss—tuus iam regnat Apollo—.” One notion Babbitt discusses in a prose section is that, rather than light's existing to illuminate objects, objects exist to register the efflorescence of light. One may be tempted to take an analogous approach to much of his poetry here—basking in the washes of vividly visual language without worrying overly much about what mere things it may signify.
Rapturous rumination that’s sometimes dazzling and at other times, dimmed.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944682-89-7
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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