Title: Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic
Authors: James Goldberg & Ardis Parshall
Illustrator: Carla Jimison
Publisher: Mormon Lit Lab
Genre: Poetry/Essay/History
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 205
Binding: Softcover
ISBN-13: 979-8664627848
Price: $ 15.99
Reviewed by Gabriel González for the Association for Mormon Letters
Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic is hard to categorize. Because one of its authors is poet James Goldberg, I expected a poetry book. Because its other main author is Ardis E. Parshall, I thought it could perhaps be a history book. It also has illustrations by Carla Jimison, so I then thought that I had an artsy kind of book in my hands. Song of Names is actually all of those things. And the synergy of these different creators and their contributions results in a text that is informative, beautiful, and relevant to Latter-day Saints.
Song of Names is a collection of 22 stories from the lives of Latter-day Saints in church history. The subtitle aptly describes the book as a “mosaic” because the text does not attempt to tell a cohesive narrative, but rather it highlights specific aspects of specific lives. This is done through an ingenious structure—each chapter is divided into three sections: the context, a poem, and a short reflective essay.
As regards the historical component, the book offers a wealth of little-known stories from Church history told at the individual level. With few exceptions, most of these stories would not be widely known. Here is where Parshall’s background as an independent historian provides a great deal of value. Most of the stories told here I was hearing about for the first time, despite the fact that I’m reading Saints and have read many books and articles on Church history.
One thing that makes these stories interesting is the reflections that they finish with. These reflections make the stories relevant to today without the sappiness that we oft associate with sacrament-meeting kind of stories. The effect of this is that Song of Names connects Latter-day Saint readers to the past and helps them see history not as a forward-moving arrow but as repeating cycles. This is particularly clear, for example, in the way the text connects the plagues of 1918 and 2020. The stories in Song of Names seem to suggest that in one way or another, all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again, so pay attention.
The historical contexts and reflections are thought-provoking, but the poems go straight for the heart. The poetry is poignant, with “Slant Villanelle for William and Mary Graves” and “Lament for Indiana Maybert” as particularly emotive pieces to me. Goldberg also tries his hand at different forms of poetry (e.g., three beautiful tankas, a rare muwashsha, etc.). A particularly noteworthy trait of the poems is that they often contain verbatim phrases from the records left behind by the people highlighted in the poems. Josiah Gibbs and James Guymon, for example, provide every word for the poems they inspired. This goes to show that poetry is everywhere, but it takes a keen eye to notice it. Considering all of this, it is fair to say that Goldberg is at the top of his game in this book.
At this point, I feel like I should mention something about the artwork, but because I’m not well versed in illustrative things, I’ll take a pass.
What I will say is that Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic should be valuable to Latter-day Saints who read it. I once heard Goldberg comment that we would do well to consider Church history as a sort of laboratory of discipleship. At the time, I did not quite understand what he meant, but through this book, it now makes perfect sense. The lives of those who walked the path before us become case studies. What the stories and poems in this book show are ordinary people struggling with the difficulties associated with real-world discipleship. By looking at the circumstances of individual Saints in the past and paying attention to how they faced their adversity, we can draw lessons in our own efforts to walk the straight and narrow path. And, thus, someday, our own descendants will be singing their own song of names, with hopefully our names as part of their mosaic.