Theric reviews 2019 Mormon poetry

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I tried to make an effort to read a lot of fresh Mormon poetry this year and Andrew asked to reproduce what I had written here. I apologize not each book is given equal time.

Leaves of Sass by R. A. Christmas, finished November 25.

I’ve been aware of Christmas forever and read him (or about him) in Sunstone and Dialogue over the years.

The acknowledgements page makes it sound like this collection is an old man making sure everything makes it into print without worrying too much whether things are quite ready to be in print yet—like he’s running against the clock, in other words.

And much of the collection reads like the bad impression that suggestion leaves. Some of the poems really do just feel like prose with line breaks. There are some winners in here, yes, but they are certainly easy to overlook given the amount of bog they’re buried in.

The two strongest works, imo, are the two final works—both lengthy.

The first is an eight-parter (although the seventh part consists of twelve parts itself) and is an homage to the Church’s involvement with Boy Scouts. An homage that includes child abuse and a look at the Scout Law that, at times, reads like a seven-deadly-sins confessional. But his love for Scouting nevertheless shines through. The combination of earnestness and earthy cynicism is a balance many of the poems in this collection aim to strike, but never better than here.

The second long poem (more than a quarter of the collection’s length) is a translation from French, an earlier version of which once appeared in Dialogue. Although not Christmas’s purely original work and a translation from a nonMormon author, it manages to be as complicatedly Mormon as anything in the book. Plus, the years of work and polish are evident and render the rest of the book even dingier in comparison. This translation deserves wider attention. I hope Valéry’s people get it into something more people will see.

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I Gave Her a Name by Rachel Hunt Steenblik with paintings by Ashley Mae Hoiland, finished November 26

My feelings about this book are almost identical to my feelings about its progenitor—you could just reread that review and know what I’m going to say next.

The Baader-Meinhof
Phenomenon applies
to our Mother. After
you first have reason
to see Her, you see Her
everywhere (228)

This pretty much captures Rachel’s entire MO. She’s seeing God the Mother in everything and writing it down. (She’s teaching us how to do this through example.) She has good instincts, so most of the poems work (although some are short to the point of absurdity), but the overall effect is of an artist’s sketchbook—a thousand versions of the same face, presumably in preparation of a major work.

In this sense, the accompanying art is perfect. Deliberately “unfinished” to the point of overlapping images and smeared or splashed paint. It captures what the poetry is doing.

Largely I find this multifaceted manner of attacking the subject successful (if, by this point, a bit redundant).

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Titiana in Yellow by Dayna Patterson, finished January 1.

I’m already familiar with Dayna’s work, of course, and the collection is as excellent and worddrunk as I expected, so this is also an opportunity to think about the chapbook publisher, Porkbelly Press. The book, as it ends up, is lovely—and their books tend to have excellent covers, as you can see if you follow the link. Many of the poems in Dayna’s collection did not quite fit on a page which led to many a widow and orphan. Turning a page to get one more line is subideal. But overall, very satisfactory. And I imagine the collection felt necessary to Dayna, practically self-titled as it is.

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The Tree at the Center by Kathryn Knight Sonntag, finished January 5.

This collection feels like the sequel Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk deserved —it takes the concept of a single-author Heavenly Mother-themed poetry collection and grounds it in new references and new forms and finds new things to say about it. I feel Kathryn and Rachel are pretty similar in skill, but the new scope and ambition of Tree at the Center makes it the more satisfying read.

I also get the sense it’ll reward rereading—and its endnotes are more helpful. Is it kind of funny, though, how the books even have the same type of notes sections?

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After Earth by Michael Lavers, finished January 12.

This is one of the finest collections I’ve read in some time. And it’s a good thing, too. His wife, an excellent poet herself, is always talking about how she’s married to her favorite poet. Now we finally get to decide for ourselves without having to hopskip across the interwebs.

You, dear reader, could have heard of him back in 2011, except he refused to allow up permission to include his work in Fire in the Pasture. He said it was still too amateur. But where six years of practice and publication were insufficient, I guess another near-ten are enough.

Anyway. Enough about that.

This is a terrific collection. His use of words and metaphor, his originality, his consistency. And it doesn’t hurt (for me) that he occasionally engages Mormonism in unique ways. (I feel justified in using the u-word; I’m more wide read in the field of Mormon letters than your average goose, even given the notorious holes in my library.)

Now, a couple connections to Mormon poets I don’t think Lavers intends (he would probably prefer I see connections to Lance Larsen and Kim Johnson—two Mormon poets who do not like the Mp-phrase).

First, Michael Collings. Lavers has a couple cosmic poems that face each other upon a spread that reminded quite a lot of some of what Collings does in Temple and Cosmos.

Second, R.A. Christmas. Lavers includes some (translations? paraphrases?) of classic poems, including Purgatory and the Aeneid, which are excellent. Similarly, in Christmas’s latest collection, one of the highlights was a translation. There might be more interesting to say about that, if someone’s looking for a thesis idea..

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The Marriage of the Moon and the Field by Sunni Brown Wilkinson, finished January 25

It took me several poems to find my way inside Wilkinson’s poetry, but once I did, I started finding powerful images and elegant structures.

From there, the book just opened up to me, and what a marvel it is. Highly recommended.

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Origami Drama by Brooke Larson.

This slender volume (twenty-five pages) is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in some time. Published by Quarterly West and worth the $15 just to see what can be done with form.

What most of the poems in the collection do is be about the paper they are printed on. Ofttimes they are printed over colored lines, the colors instructing you as to what order you should fold the page in order to make it into the poem—“Paper Ball for Games” or “Paper Daggers” are two titles where this can be obvious with only the title to consider.

But the papers don’t necessarily need to be folded. “Grease Catcher” has no fold lines—it just instructs you to “Rip this page out. Rip it out and place it on your / cutting board.” This poem engages with its physical reality as ink on paper in a way I’ve never seen before.

That “/” above I’m a bit uncertain about. Most of the poems are fully justified so that the text can form a square, like origami paper. It’s part of the conceit and therefore cool, but it does make the line breaks seem more like prose than like line breaks, and some of the poems ramble on a bit in order to fill the space. But that’s part of the difficulty of what’s been attempted here and what’s being attempted here is too dang cool not to celebrate regardless.

The final poem, “Written Concern,” is (like some of its precedents) less obviously concerned with its physical reality. (A mode of poetry Larson has pushed to extremes.) But it might be the most emotionally raw poem in the collection. I certainly was moved by it.

I think you might be too.

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