Review

Title: Grace Like Water
Author: Merrijane Rice
Publisher: Mormon Lit Lab
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 87
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9798683901394
Price: 12.00

Reviewed by Heather Harris Bergevin for the Association of Mormon Letters

While we’re discussing study guides for scripture study, we usually forget meditative examples like poetry. Merrijane Rice’s poems are vastly different than my own, and her structures and complexities are a refreshing read. Nevertheless, one of the most delightful things about her new book, Grace Like Water is not only how it was composed, but how it can likewise be used. Rice set about in her own reading and study, and, week by week, chose specific scriptural examples from the New Testament to determine her topics, and the resulting poems are both gentle and peaceful reflections upon both meridian times and those today. They can be read in order along with a similar reading of the New Testament, and scriptural references are given for each, both on the page of the poem itself, and at the close of the book.

In one of my personal favorites, for example, Rice begins:

After what felt like forty days fasting,
I left church famished. The devil said;

It’s not time for dinner but
Well past lunch.
You could eat.

“I do have a headache,” I thought.
I had a Diet Coke.

I love poetry and meditations which ask of us to put ourselves in the places of those in the scriptures, and to consider from their viewpoints what we are learning. What of the man blind since birth, who has been told he has a devil in him, who is told that visions come to all faithful who go to the temple…but the visions do not come? What of Thomas, doubting? Did James know that by including one sentence in his counsels he would change the world?

Rice’s world is not here to throttle or confuse you. She’s not trying to rock you off a cliff, but is genuinely asking: what have we not considered? All of these stories are so familiar, and yet we know there is great good here. There is peace here. What more can be gleaned by searching just a little further?

I enjoyed Rice’s meditations, and I hope you will as well. In a world of sound and fury, some gentle and quiet kindness is greatly necessary. Nathan Rice’s art adds to the meditational quality of the book, bringing the reader to a reminder of those things discussed, but not drawing all focus to them self. The total effect is watercolor words and softness in all of the best ways.