Recently, the poet and critic William Logan summed up the way that many poets and readers alike tend to see poetry. "There are still those odd sorts," he said, "no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and torturers of cats, who love poetry nevertheless." It reminded me of a comment by another poet, Geoffrey Nutter, who accused poets of having a kind of Stockholm Syndrome; they are overly sympathetic with their critics. Poets become apologetic, timid, suspicious of both their craft and their audience.
Even so, the poem remains a uniquely potent and powerful form, and the brave ignore the critics and work their magic with words. To this class belongs Susanna Childress and her haunting collection Entering the House of Awe (her second book of poems, following Jagged with Love, which was selected by Billy Collins to win the Brittingham Prize).
Reading Entering the House of Awe, I thought of a moment from Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, when Norrell visits the theoretical magicians of York (who believe magic no longer exists). Stone statues come to life. The voices of the dead are heard echoing in a cathedral. Magic is alive and well, it turns out, and the world is revealed to be richer and more complex than we ever thought.
This is what it's like to read to Childress' poems. She reminds us of the power and life that are hidden in words. Her style in this volume tends towards longer, narrative lines in which she plays with form, tone, and pace, evoking laughter or horror or melancholy in language that manages to be at once conversational and challenging. Thankfully, New Issues/Western Michigan University Press has printed these poems in a beautiful edition that leaves enough room on each page for Childress' lines to dance and stretch.
She prefaces the collection with a passage from Denise Levertov, which reads like a prayer of invocation:
Marvelous Truth
confront us
at every turn, in every
guise, dark horse,
egg, iron ball, shadow,
cloud of breath
on the air.
Childress then begins her own prayer "about the women who pummel their children / in public," weaving together images of maternal and biblical violence:
Both you and I been angry enough to shake a baby to turn over tables Lady /at the airport flinging her spatula of a girl again and again / into a chair SIT loud enough to render an ocean still only she isn't she wails You saw
In a casual tone, she laments,
The Problem Almighty
is what Janet's mother said of French-kissing teens Do that for the world to
see
and you've got to wonder what's done in private This is not loaves and fishes is not the white stone on which you'll carve our new names this is the lopped-off ear the hem of your gown after all those years of blood You send us hell-bent upon each other each lurking bully quite sure of representing Capital-Y So I can ask
you
(as my mother would say swatting the air to keep her fists from me O you)
with your feathers who bends but a portion of our hearts
toward hell
The structure of these stanzas, the lack of punctuation and the long gaps between certain words, reads like someone who is breathless and gasping, reeling between the discontinuity of what they witness and what they want to believe.
This is Childress' magic, a wild brew of violence, absurdity, and beauty, all tangled up in the quotidian: the way a green spider noticed in the shower can suddenly make the world appear "intricate … delicate and composed."
The collection's title is apt, and perhaps Childress intends it as a bit of pun. While the phrase "Entering the house of awe" conjures (for this reader, anyway) a sense of transcendence, in Childress' poems, it also suggests the word "awful." To read her is to experience a wide-eyed encounter with sorrow, loss, and violence. She renders these encounters conversationally, connecting the commonplace and comical to the grotesque and the tragic in movements as fluid as thought.
In "Torn", it's a laughable conversation with a friend about his fear of birds that reminds her of a fear of balloons, rooted in being sexually assaulted by "the neighbor boy" at a birthday party. "Papi," she laments, "how could you know that balloons, to this day, loose my bowels? / I never told you. / I swore it was a dream."
In "All Hallow Even", it's an encounter with love in the midst of an obscene Halloween party. She begins trying to avoid "the man with a tray of triangled sandwiches / surrounding a foot-long rubber penis or the other guy / with gigantic strap-on boobs looming over cocktails, a lady / in one of those sexy bunny outfits offering, Mine are real." But these figures are eventually eclipsed by the one she loves, whose presence rescues her from the chaos as his "hot spirit / seems to bob each moment like a hard-boiled egg." Love cuts through the obscene milieu, a joyful surprise: "and this is how it might be, our worlds shattered with a clarity / we don't know what to do with."
"It's Bright as Heaven out Here" recounts another stark juxtaposition; an encounter with a Black Widow spider that came ten minutes after hearing the news that her Grandfather is in a coma, and the encounter becomes a story she wants to tell him. Her friend seizes an apple and smashes the spider with it. "I thought maybe / you'd like to know of it, hovering as you are, between here and there, / how what needs to happen will happen, / even if it surprises the breath right out of you."
Throughout the collection, she returns to themes of faith, particularly the tensions that come from life in a shattered world. In "The Wry World Shakes Its Head", she contrasts Isaiah 40's promises of comfort with "your mother's retarded cousin / Roy Dale," who at three years old "drank Drain-O and scoured clean / his grey-soft brain." He's looked after by his crass sister Shirley Ann, whose new breast implants leave her skin "splotched red as holy text."
She renders these contrasts in an irreducible tension, in a way that resists explanation. For Childress, faith isn't an opiate for suffering, but something that brings the pain of suffering into a sharp focus. The problem is not necessarily with the idea of a transcendent God who holds history together in a harmony. It is, instead, with the temptation to observe jaw-dropping horrors and respond, limply, that "God has a plan" and that "one day, it will all make sense." These responses don't address the suffering at all. They only serve to insulate the one speaking from the tragedy, to provide a sense of psychological distance by insisting on meaning and purpose. As G. K. Chesterton said about the book of Job, "God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them."
Reading Entering the House of Awe is not unlike listening to God's speech to Job. Childress holds out image after image for us to observe, each one humbling and confounding, sometimes for their beauty and sometimes for their horror, each one rendered in an earthy, tactile kind of immanence. We feel their weight, their looming complexity. It's a world that is truly awe-full, paradoxically lovely and cruel, and, as with God's speech to Job, we find ourselves humbled, silenced, and mysteriously comforted by it.
Mike Cosper is the Pastor of Worship and Arts at Sojourn Community Church, where he's served since its founding in 2000. He is the author of Rhythms of Grace: How the Church's Worship Tells the Story of the Gospel, co-author of Faithmapping (with Daniel Montgomery), and author of the forthcoming The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth, coming from Crossway in August.
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