Author: Kathryn Knight Sonntag
Title: The Tree at the Center
BCC Press, 2020. 96 pages. Poetry collection.
Reviewed by Blaise Meursault (reprinted from The Ships of Hagoth).
There are days when I consider the very real possibility that I don’t actually enjoy contemporary poetry, that I only muscle through it all out of some misbegotten sense of English majory duty, that the manifold MFA programs out there are merely keeping poetry on life-support, that the genre’s best days are irrevocable behind it. But then every so often a new collection comes out of the blue, and I’m in love all over again.
Kathryn Knight Sonntag’s The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019) was written by a non-MFA grad, which just might be its key difference from so much other contemporary poetry: these are poems that emerged from a sacred place–in the ancient sense of something set apart, distinct, different from the usual state of human affairs–not informed by any particular school but bypassing them all entirely for the oldest school of all. Like Joseph Smith, she has “got the oldest book in the world; but I have the oldest book in my heart, even the gift of the Holy Ghost. I have all the four Testaments. Come here, ye learned men, and read, if you can.”
The over-arching theme of her collection (as noted in all prior reviews of the collection) is that of the Divine Feminine, something we ourselves have published about BEFORE; as I had written then (if you will indulge me a moment), I had in my YSA years in Utah met a wide variety of young women from whom I’d regularly hear things like:
“‘You Elders have something I wish I had: the Priesthood’ (I heard that from a Sister missionary); or, ‘when I get to the other side, Heavenly Father and I are going to have a long talk about why women get the short end of the stick so often’ (I heard that from an RM and Relief Society Instructor); or, ‘I wonder what Heavenly Mother is like? The Prophets and Apostles and God the Father and Jesus Christ are all men, I want so badly a feminine model I can look up to and emulate, to know what it looks like to be a divine woman’ (I heard that one from about the most conservative, modest Midwest girl I’ve ever met). Again, these were hardly the target audience for Ordain Women or FeministMormonHousewives or what not, they were not liberal agitators out on the margins, no, these were the conservative ones, the faithful, believing ones! It they still feel this yearning, what of the rest of us?”
Kathryn Knight Sonntag has actually sought to do something about that yearning for the divine feminine, and has done so with transcendence, grace, and precision.
Of course, as anyone raised on mediocre Church art is aware, it is not enough to merely “teach good principles,” but there must actually be some skill involved for the artists not to embarrass themselves; fortunately, Kathryn Knight Sonntag has that in spades. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order,” and she does so here. It would here be best to let her poetry speak for itself; some samples:
“I never desired to be a symbol,
but since the Feminine Divine
brought up your soft round
warmth from my depths
crawling on my chest to coo and sigh, I
am one working prism of Her endless
blinking body.” (“As A Mother,” pg. 38)
_
And here’s another sample from her poem on being postpartum:
“I wanted to be
the constant revolving sun
for you, son
dropped like an arrow,
but instead I am
the molted skin of an unclaimed
creature–full dust and wind–
trying to understant
how everything left me
when I had you.” (“Nine Month Postpartum,” pg. 40)
_
Or most harrowing of all, from her poem on postpartum depression:
“To ‘see things as they really are’
was a mirror without a face
left hovering in the void
growing each time no one
could tell me from where
the imbalance came, why
the dirty dishes in the sink robbed me
of self, gutted me like the last
salmon still swimming” (“Postpartum Depression,” pg. 42)
_
Terryl Givens has tried to coin the phrase “Radical Orthodoxy.” Kathryn Knight Sonntag has actually practiced it.
The Tree at the Center is available on Amazon through BCCPress HERE.