Susan Baller-Shepard Finishing Line Press, 102 pages Susan Baller-Shepard’s “Doe” is a striking poetry collection. I was captured by this slender (66 poems) volume’s cover photo of a doe standing in a late autumn field. The doe knows you’re watching her. So do the poems. The sustaining metaphor of this collection is the doe as a figure for the lives and concerns of women, and the world women live in. Though written with particularity, with a poet’s eye for detail, these are not small poems, narrowly confined to the poet’s life experience. In all their intimacy, they move between personal experience and larger questions of living in creation. “Muliebrity” is a literary synonym for “womanhood.” In that one delicious word hides the key to the dual vision of both poem and collection. Doe is a poetic tour de force on muliebrity that refuses to be tamed by grammar. The book has five sections: “Does and Fawns” – about the intimacies of mothers and offspring; “Bucks” – meditating … [Read more...]
Doe
Apophasis
Nothing happens in this room. That is why we come. Pews have ceased to creak beneath their burden. Elders summing up the worth of lives, exhausted careworn parents, antsy children — all gone now. A gasp escapes an organ pipe. Like a canyon breeze, it serves to warn the pilgrim of a fast-approaching storm. We walk in holy canyons before a rain, before the drowning torrent washes clean the remnants of unsanctified terrain. This is the honest hour, when all pretense has flown. Nothing knows and nothing is unknown. Holy words may yet be said, holy music sung, holy food broken and poured in holy ware. Nothing makes them holy, and makes us one. Beyond the reach of prayers for grace, surpassing justice neither blind nor balanced true, solace trickles down in wordless blessing, like drops from canyon walls after a deluge, oblations to the god whom none can claim, who obeys no law, and has no name. Nothing happens in this room. That is why we … [Read more...]
Joseph’s Bones
The bones of Joseph, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem, in the portion of the land Jacob had bought from the children of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for one hundred pieces of money; it became an inheritance of the descendants of Joseph. (Joshua 24:32) Impossibly long the trail that leads from there to here, up from parted water through empty desolations no one cares to own, to a stopping place safe from the whip, beneath a willow tree. The earth is weeping. Each step is a tear, witness to the passage of his bones. He is laid to rest — if there is such a thing as rest in this migrant life, always moving with the rhythms of the world, one step ahead of terror, one step short of grace. His father bought this land, they say. He is at peace, they say. It is inheritance, they say, this land, this rock-hewn charnel for his bones. But who belongs here? Who knows any peace but the sweet caress of the morning breeze, the fiery … [Read more...]
Blue-eyed Snake
What in the world is a blue-eyed snake? A sign that things are surely changing, that what is old is sloughing off, not yet replaced by something new. It’s hard to know just where you’re going when you can’t see just where you are. Snakes shed their skin. It’s how things are. It must be hard to be a snake: about the time you get things going your eyes grow dim and things start changing. You have no choice: you face the new blind as a bat. The first thing off is eyelid skin — before it’s off it turns opaque, and your eyes are useless and blue. It’s nothing new, unless you don’t know you’re a snake, can’t understand why things are changing, can’t see which way the way the world is going. I can’t help wondering if what’s going on with us is not far off from snakes whose skin is always changing. How vulnerable it seems we are to fear of change. Like a snake reflexively we hiss at new threats perceived though unseen, new phantoms in the fog, going past in … [Read more...]
Drift
For the 2018 graduating class of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Three hundred fifty million years ago an urge so deep no tongue may shape its name congregated continents together — Pangaea, as we call it — and the land was one, and rivers ran and mountains rose, caressed the sky, and sang the songs of home. Two hundred twenty million years ago Pangaea broke apart, or so they say. The great rift valleys tore the lands asunder; they drifted to the corners of the wind, and came to rest in distant far-flung places, sang other songs, were known by other names. And soon enough the time will come for leaving. New continents will know you by new names, new waters shape new waves upon your shores. These moments we believe to be eternal are but songs we’re given for a while; they drift away, and other songs begin. But pause, and recollect what brought you here — an urge that even now you cannot name, that gathered you together in this place and gave you … [Read more...]
Inferno
Blood runs in the streets. Where shall we place the blame when blood is blood, and death is death? We descend into the flame. “Abandon hope, ye who enter.” We did that long ago, it seems. Lucifer is our landlord; we mortgage our bedraggled dreams. Rage is our handmaiden and violence our chosen part. We know these paths; the weary way from Ferguson to Charlotte And on, God help us, on and on to killing fields as yet unknown. Shoot first and question later is the moral of the gun. When we look into another’s eyes and see their hate or fear, is it not our own reflection that seems to us most clear? PAUL HOOKER is a teaching elder member of New Covenant Presbytery and associate dean for ministerial formation and advanced studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. … [Read more...]
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