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
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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