EthicalDative

Christian J. Collier publishes three poems in Poetry, September 2024: “God,” “Case Study” and “The Compline.” Spoken cleanly, rhythmically, hotly, they orbit around experience gleaned from the crucible of propagating life.

Formal religion can be heavy on bone and light on meat. Collier’s poems flesh out the argument with God that makes faith flicker for me as a kind of alive thing in others. The poems emit sparks of light from the human clash with a theology swaddled in hoary patristics, with the unendurable meant to be endured. Paradox’s alter ego is the Great Indefinite, the Hidden-yet-Revealed eidolon which demands abject submission on top of dogged adoration. It has to be unreal and otherworldly to cohere, if at all, in the human psyche.

I’ll write only of Collier’s “God.” It starts here:

I used to think
there was only one of You
before the miscarriage.
Now I am not so sure.
Maybe there are a number of Gods to wade through
before falling at the feet of the last true one:

In an indented block, the poem cycles through a divine catwalk of temporizing avatars attached to primitivistic epithets and reductive seductions:

the jade God we pray to
who does not come or answer
& and the plum one who appears to offer salvation;
the opal God who offers a limited extent of His kingdom
and the olive one who only offers condolences;
let us not forget the violet God that is bad with man
because He is deeply holy.

The poem alights on the ostensibly desirable God: “We all seek the one of manna though, don’t we?” Three stanzas evoke with ambiguous edginess the God “holding all we hunger for / like butterscotch in His palms.” The speaker, traversing inky moments of mundane days and nights, dreams “with eyes open of goading Him into halting my child’s rest, / guiding his or her tiny light close to the brushfire / flickering in my breath.”

Goading Him! The verb is explosive. Indefinite binary “his or her”; light that’s “tiny”; anomalous “halting” of a child’s “rest”; these are stinging formulations. The rest in question is death. An unrealized life form is being sucked back into the impossibly capacious bosom whence it came, or whatever. Where are “mercy” and “justice” in this sorry transaction? The poem voices a despairing piety that seethes to rescue an imperiously snatched entity from “that God.” Here’s the ending:

That God? That great and swollen orange storm?
That’s the God haunting me. The God who keeps His distance.
The God whose star-draped hands I envy.
They come at day’s end
to tuck my baby, my ember, into its infinite, feathered bed.

“My ember” calls back piercingly to the “brushfire flickering in my breath.” I’m rarely reached as acutely as this by poetry in which faith and grief tangle with such expressive fury.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

The words of Kate Asche’s poem “[Untitled]” (Poetry, May 2024) enact a sac-like image on the page. Leapfrog the spaces between them and they (the words) hang together as if magnetized, flowing into shattering assertions. A life is lost in this poem. It illustrates the power of conveying an ordeal by skirting emotive language in favor of a dispassionate, grievously minute telling. Or showing?

(In my excerpt, where there’s an ellipsis, imagine incremental spaces which contribute to bulging the poem into its circular aspect on the page.)

the sac
itself was … clear
and I cleaned it … like a window
and in the window … saw my baby
our baby … [birdlike
mouth open … nasal … area still
oversized … like a beak] … eye’s aperture blue-black
head thrown … back … and twisted beginning
to separate … neck brok
en in the contractions’ … violence …
[…]

The next-to-last-line, fracturing the word “broken” at a syllabic juncture, executes the most violent enjambment possible in poetry. Even the formality of a hyphen is dispensed with. 

Detail suggests the speaker has agency in this grave matter, is constrained to follow a procedure, and is painfully observant along the way. Note the pointed fallback from “my” baby to “our” baby. The emphasis on the shared origin of the failed life that’s being let go of recurs in the poem.

There’s much more than what I’ve cited. You have to see the poem to apprehend it. (Be prepared to look up some medical terms.) Surpassingly strange and explicit, it’s a lump-in-throat inducing achievement, graphic in multiple senses. Solid syntax which makes the words cohere across their spacing helps the reader navigate the form factor. The poem transmits indelible ache through language that embraces the unstintingly clinical.

The circle closes; the poem ends:

I handed this … singular life over
never saw my child
again

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved