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Allan Brown
Three from St. Thomas Corona Radiata by Alice Major. Toronto, ON: St. Thomas Press, 2000. 47 pp. $9.50. With Averted Vision by Hannah Main-van der Kamp. Toronto, ON: St. Thomas Press, 2000. 48 pp. $9.50. The Salvation of Desire by Barry Dempster. Toronto, ON: St. Thomas Press, 2000. 48 pp. $9.50.

    St. Thomas's church on Huron Street in Toronto has maintained a vigorous public association with poetry since 1988 with a series of annual readings, and since 1996 with the publication of the St. Thomas Poetry Series of three books a year by Canadian authors whose work, as the series editor concisely puts it, "witness[es] to the religious meaning of experience."

    The fifteen witnesses thus far have been well chosen, with a useful balance of well known names (seven of them have appeared in David A. Kent's classic historical survey) along with others who are less familiar or, like Mia Anderson and John Terpstra, for example, are usually associated with other forms of writing.

    The small, well-designed volumes provide the oppportunity for a more detailed involvement with the work of the writers represented in the series than is often possible with journal publication or general collections.1 The greater scope of the individual books also gives the writers an opportunity to shape and present their particular artistic personae.

    The persons in this year 2000 set are distinct enough.2 Alice Major has chosen the simplest format, a spiritually articulated account of pregnancy. Hannah Main-van der Kamp works rather with a singular point of view, presenting the peregrinations of the quasi-character "Soul." Barry Dempster supplies the most greatly varied material of the three, a continuing study of self and society that is unified chiefly by his familiar, mildly expressionistic style, and by his indefatigable honesty.

    The conceit of gestation / parturition in Corona Radiata can be understood and usefully approached in three principal ways: an overall set of image clusters, as the poet does with her carefully chosen titles and arrangement of titles; the seeding and expansion (both quite apt to the conceit here) of a couple of general metaphors, notably those of art as making and word (logos) as message; and an often implicit echoing and reformatting of supportive biblical references.

    The first of these approaches discovers a kind of spiritualized Darwinism with the elements of gestation representing the evolutionary process as a sacred parody - using the term in George Herbert's sense. Alice Major has taken a substantial risk here, making a take-it-or-leave-it gesture that will either be accepted or rejected whole.

    Her metaphorical play with art and word is simpler, more familiar, and more likely to succeed. The very first poem of the book, "Ships," introduces the art of an aristocratic music: "Cells begin // their courtly, kaleidoscope pavane." In the section titled "Ear," aural art is presented both as "Water music, whale song, sea of sound" and as "earth music . . . chopped / into notes." The second section of the book, a five-poem set called "Gender," considers the "Criss-crossing chromosomes" as "A word hoard, vocabulary of divergence." The sixth section, "Spine," expands the trope in a quasi-narrative articulation as "Encrypted messages are passed to officials / trained in puzzling out significance." Both image lines relate interestingly to a late poem by Pat Lowther, "The Animals Per Se," the lead piece from the ms. she was completing at the time of her death. Lowther emphasizes how "the structure" of bipeds: is inside like an idea the body is moulded around it the concept is similar to art. (185)

    The Lowther poem may not be a source here, but it is a useful analogue.

    The biblical reference base is the subtlest of the three approaches. The general epigraph for the book is taken, naturally enough, from Psalm 139: 13-14: "For thou didst form my inward parts; thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb ... I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And like Donne's Holy Sonnet 5 ("I am a little world made cunningly"), the poetry of Corona Radiata cleaves near enough to an individual person to be a species of spiritual confession. But Major has an eye here for outward things as well, both for themselves - "familiar, / old-world flowers - demure primrose, rainbow iris" ("Garden") - and for their use as tropes: "The child sets out along the forest paths / to make her fortune" ("Forest"). These movements into naturalism pick up, if only by analogy, the alternative interpretation of the psalm's "wonders" as "awesome things" that is preserved in the Masoretic Text reading of "nora'ot" (Psalms 293).

    Some of this scriptural reference base is quite loose, like the casual use of the term "diaspora" in "Road," but most of it plays a significant part in the poetic patterning. Major comments on the operation of the developing heart in "City,"3 as "the coronary artery branches off and bends / back into a maze of alleys that hug the city walls," just as the female speaker in the Song of Solomon "will rise and go through the City; in the streets and the squares" (3:2A). Modern medical knowledge expands a long-familiar Old Testament image in "Dominion" with its reference to "Amygdala. The brain's almond." The "amygdala," the poet explains in a detailed note, "is a small lobe located below each half of the brain." The white flower (shaqed) is, of course, Jeremiah's sign for the imminent growth and birth of prophetic vision (1:11), and the psalmic echo in 1:5A "Before I formed you in the womb" provides quiet support for Major's gestation motif. The agitation of the birth moment, "the fling of self / against the urgent flow of time," picks up from and reformulates the apocalpyptic energies of Trito-Isaiah: "Before she was in labor she bore ... she brought forth" (66:7).4 The urge here is for some form of completion;5 or perhaps, in terms of the book's overall trope, an evolutionary goal expressed (such is the poet's gentle paradox) in religious terms. A simpler, though similarly focussed statement of goal appears in her study of St. Scholastica ("Vigiliae") where Scholastica "imagine[s] my bones //...waiting / for the strings of resurrection." (Complete 14).

    These references are handled with tact; they are employed but not exhausted. Alice Major avoids the problem of overexposure, of producing "a spiritual TV guide / with no mute button," as she put it in an earlier publication (Scenes 14), and achieves an effective, if somewhat restricted balance in her technique.

    Hannah Main-van der Kamp's With Averted Vision would probably profit from a similar restraint. The forty one lyrics taken individually or in small clusters provide intriguing perceptions and suggestions, but there are too many of them here. The overthought of the full collection is, in a rather loose sense, Keatsian, alluding to the "Ode to Psyche," and tracing a reified "Soul" from the "vale of soul making" letter.

    Though the poems as a whole tend, as I have suggested, to be rather repetitive, there is an interesting complexity in one of the specifically Christian pieces, "Easter Monday and Soul Is Content but Spirit Wants to Return to Lent." The dialectic that she employs follows the classic Chinese tradition of, e.g., T'ao Ch'ien, and maintains a similar unsettling irony. To some extent also it attempts an expansion and poetic exploration of St. Paul's distinction in Corinthians I of pneumatikos and psychikos (15:44B).

    The repeated appearances of "Soul" in the book are somewhat wearisome, but what "Soul" sees and describes is worth looking at. The arboreal setting of "Sometimes Soul Needs To Be a Little Crazy" becomes precise and distinctive as "Arbutus strips bare in the winter clearing" and "Sap-green leaves glisten juicy as April." These quiet effects have appeared also in her earlier work, such as the four-part "Gulf Islands Suite" (Gift 51-52), as "Gulls / lope home" and "Robins close their final dialogue, stir once, / are settled" ("III Pender"). A similar geographical reference, "The Fraser River bends around Sumas Mountain," appears at the beginning of the denser, more introspective "Samaritan Woman Soul" of With Averted Vision. An equally well rendered perception appears in the earlier symbolic piece, "The Sea Separates From The Dry Land" (Parable 16), as "Glass petals melt to shore," along with quite naturalistic sand pipers and kingfishers, marking "the edge of the known world."

    The freshness of such passages as these marks the best of Hannah Main-van der Kamp's work and the ingenuous self she presents is a useful element in spiritual growth. Her frankness is engaging, but like the ubiquitous character of "Soul," too often asserted, becomes over familiar, almost vacuous. She speaks in "Body Is Brought to Her Senses" of wishing "To be here wholly in my body: its discomforts, / its consolations," which is little more than a versified form of the cliche of being or not being comfortable in one's skin. Much the same problem occurred in "Desert Cistercians Decide To Plant Roses"(Parable) where she identifies, or over-identifies her quest: "I crave a simple persona"(76). Her voice is more effective when it relaxes a bit. The complexly titled "Avowal of Exhaustion Is the Antecedent of Solace" in With Averted Vision exhibits a moving humilty as Soul "draggles in with some flattened sparrows" and asserts her/his need: To be allowed this niche. Perhaps collapse here forever and not care, no longer able to question or pretend anything.

    There is the Keatsian echo here, of course, of ceasing upon the midnight with no pain; and also, I suspect, a voice (or a space) closer to hand, a delicate remembering of Anne Hebert's "hands folded / Over this devastated space / [that] Grow cold and fascinated with emptiness."6 Another, more familiar echo (of Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats") occurs in the first poem of the book where Soul is identified with poetry itself, as "making nothing happen" ("Soul Sights the Andromeda Galaxy"). These literary associations suggest a larger, more objective shape that the poet may be working toward.

    The Salvation of Desire is the most broadly based and poetically secure of the three collections. The title poem fashions a concise portrait of the author reflecting upon the "years . . . / since summer wore a towel / and slid so easily past Sunday nights." The picture objectifies and generalizes with an allusion to Genesis 2:7, "where nakedness divides from dust," and a casual creation is accomplished. The varying degrees of "Desire" focus just after the mid point of the poem as the poet discovers himself "Wanting you, wanting to believe." This condition is common to all serious religious seekers. The quiet pathos of the repeated word form here is an effective parallel with Anne Sexton's distinction that "Need is not quite belief" ("With Mercy for the Greedy" in Armstrong, ed. 85-86).

    Dempster has explored such uncertainties before, as in the soft voiced, more self indulgent piece "Drowning" from his 1983 collection Globe Doubts, where looking into "the shiny blank pages" of his Bible, "I see my own reflection" (47). But in the new book his humour bounces beyond such a dolorous self as "Desire still teases," though now the teaser pops out of "a hungry spill of waves" in "a fling of dreams rising." The images here clearly invoke the foam-born Aphrodite anaduomene and her power of sexual and personal renewal.7 An interesting combination of personal urgings and cultural icons; and as he concludes with poetic tongue firmly in cheek: "No wonder / the evening glows, God blushing everywhere."

    The involvment of this poem and others on two levels, Christian and Classical, effectively locates Barry Dempster within the humanist tradition. Not, of course, "humanist" in the crude, fundamentalist sense of non- or anti-religious; but as an independent, sometimes agnostic Christian humanist, like Petrarch. It is a humanism usually framed by humour, sometimes inwardly directed, sometimes outwardly, and always informed and guided by what the maverick British theolog Harry Williams once termed "the angel of laughter" (4).

    And it is a laughter often directed at himself. He appears as a kind of punk Faust in the outragous danse macabre of "How I Surrender to the Devil," in which "Party hearty, / one of us shouts, bursting into a karaoke / version of The Hallelujah Chorus." The rough edged voice here is reminiscent of his satiric presentation of Billy Graham, "Microphone in his mouth. / Bellow[ing] psalms. Proverbs of / universal tongues" (Positions 78; rpt. in Kent, ed.). More delicately, though with equally effective foolishness, he fumblingly accepts the present of a "wrinkled buttercup" from a child and: hold my stem admiringly, trying my damnedest to look as pleased as God holding up his first-made sea ("When Spring Seems More Than You Can Take").

    A simpler instance of this self-objectivity, as it may be called, appears in "God, Last Words" (Fire 47-48) as the poet remembers glancing down at the "Temporary grace / reflected in my Sunday shoes" (48).

    His wit and exegesis come most expressively together in The Salvation of Desire with "Pilgrims," a triptych of patriarchs - Moses, Noah, and Adam. He demonstrates an easy familiarity with these characters, presenting a bold, almost rednecked Adam as "conqueror of gardens." A more tentative, more easily known and approachable first man had concluded Dempster's 1990 collection The Unavoidable Man, where he is seen "Playing names, fussing with / the breeze" ("Adam and Innocence" 74; rpt. in McCaslin, ed). He humanizes the others with simple descriptive phrases, as "This man Moses walks the May forest / among triliums and wild violets" and psychological insights, seeing Noah "wishing / he had someone to tell / how good it is to remain." An interesting parallel to Dempster's approach here appears in the work of Russell Thornton, as he presents, "The Abraham the rain makes, / the Isaac the rain takes by the hand" ("The Beauty of the Word").

    Several of Barry Dempster's persistent concerns and image lines, including his highly personalized angels, converge about half way through the book with "Man Praying." The idea of illumination/enlightenment becomes visibly itself at a typical, mildly foolish human moment as the eponymous "Man" of the piece "cries to the sky, all eyes upon him, / fluorescent lights steaming on his skin." The casual splendour and carefully controlled tone here remind me of Don McKay's equally transcendent reference to moonlight "silvering the fine hairs on your arm" ("Kamasutra" 46). Dempster's tone varies from line to line in his sympathetic, slapstick account of "Man in pain" at the point - but not quite at the point - of conversion and union. "What exactly does he expect?" the poet asks, and then suggests "Tall, strapping angels, the kind with / muscular wings." Other kinds in The Salvation of Desire include the subjective "angel / on my shoulder" of "Happy," the dramatized "Some days I think I might be an angel" of "St. Therese of Lisieux, 15," and the self-reflective conceit of "Portrait of Angel with Speck of Dust." There are many other such references in his earlier work, though of particular interest is the way in which the first adjective and the tone of the expression in "Man Praying" echo and develop the "rearrangements / of tall angels" from his more speculative set "The God Poems" ("Trying To Rearrange The Sky," Globe 52).

    But an angel's work, it seems, is never done - the religious task, re + ligare, of bringing/binding together.8 The poet restates the need ("wanting to believe") for connection with the divine as "simply / a voice from above or within." This long familiar, almost cliched notion of God-within then moves deftly beyond cliche into the profound simplicity of "as long / as it's somewhere close." Here is the utterly Other and the individual intimate Self; the Thou Art That of the Atman;9 the infinite space that is also the small vein set in your neck. Such associations occur often and with full metaphysical resonance in Dempster's work; but I was interested to discover much the same insight expressed by the Vancouver-based street poet Ryan Kamstra: "be real," a hippie ex-con once advised me over beer because reality's honed sharper than the body-loyalty of a tattoo ("And Other Social Animals" 13).

    Here and in his other books Dempster moves easily through the open, questioning conditions of personal and artistic paradox, knowing and not-knowing at once. This balancing act of gnosis and a-gnosis in The Salvation of Desire well illustrates Karen Armstrong's general insight that "The ambiguities that the poet discovers in the language are a form of agnosticism" ("Introduction" to Armstrong, ed. 34). Barry Dempster's poetry never lacks the courage to move into this creative nothingness, which is not less than the radical uncertainty of the world's great mystics, but also never attempts to be more than a common human experience. His artistic persona here is both heroic and self-deprecating (the angel of laughter acknowledges and accomplishes both), oddly but persistently searching through "Absence, the house hollowed of everything / but superstition, desperation, maybe even awe" ("The Search.").10

    The spiritus of these three collections certainly does ubi vult spirat, as the fourth Evangelist didn't quite put it. Yet Alice Major's teleological arc, the itinerant footsteps of Hannah Main-van der Kamp, Barry Dempster's multiply dividing selves - each of these has an appropriate form, with vision and words working together. As Thomas Merton, himself no slouch at such workings, carefully reminds us: "Poetry is . . . a virtue of the practical intellect" (119-20). What matters with these spirits is simply their poems.

Notes

1. Susan McCaslin's generously proportioned anthology makes more concentration possible, with 300 pages apportioned to only sixteen writers, though Barry Dempster is the only one of the St. Thomas writers represented in it.

2. Unless otherwise specified, the citations to Major, etc. identify the three titles listed at the beginning of this review. All other items are listed in Additional Works Cited after these notes.

3. A similar City/Creation complex occurs in the sequence "Tales for an Urban Sky" ("How men and women came to be") which presents and explores the relationship of "First Street Man" and "First Street Woman" (Tales 19).

4. Trans. John L. McKenzie, in Second Isaiah 205.

5. Another, more tightly physical instance of such an urge toward completion appears in her description of menstrual "blood waiting / to be born" ("Diana" in the "Star-seeing night" sequence, Tales 87).

6. "La chambre fermée," trans. F. R. Scott, in Pearce, ed. 60-61.

7. A similar dip into Greek mythological spirituality occurs in Susan McCaslin's "Conch" from her contribution to the 1997 St. Thomas series.

8. See Hick 31-33 for a useful summary of the societal dimensions of this notion.

9. See Armstrong History 30, 131.

10. Another brief poem by Russell Thornton examines this mystery of "how God fables his own self-estranging cry" ("Seashell").

Additional Works Cited

• Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. New York: Ballantine, 1993.
  ---, ed. Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

• Dempster, Barry. Fire and Brimstone. Montreal: Empyreal, 1997.
  ---. Globe Doubts. Kingston, ON: Quarry, 1983.
  ---. Positions to Pray In. Montreal: Guernica, 1989.
  ---. The Unavoidable Man. Kingston, ON: Quarry, 1990.

• Hick, John H. Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. Foundations of Philosophy Series. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983.

• Kamstra, Ryan. "And Other Social Animals." sub-Terrain 30 (2001): 13.

• Kent, David A., ed. Christian Poetry in Canada. Toronto: ECW, 1989.

• Lowther, Pat. Time Capsule: New and Selected Poems. Vancouver, BC: Polestar, 1996.

• Major, Alice. Complete within herself. Victoria, BC: Hawthorne Society/Reference West, 1997.
  ---. Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Cafe. Fredericton, NB: B S Poetry Society, 1998.
  ---. Tales for an Urban Sky. Fredericton, NB: Broken Jaw, 1999.

• Main-van der Kamp, Hannah. A Gift of Ruin. Windsor, ON: Netherlandic, 1995.
  ---. The Parable Boat. Toronto: Wolsak and Wynn, 1999.

• McCaslin, Susan. Veil / Unveil. Toronto: St. Thomas, 1997.
  ---, ed. A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Victoria, BC: Ekstasis, 1999.

• McKay, Don. Another Gravity. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.

• Merton, Thomas. "Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal." Selected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1959.

• Pearce, Jon, ed. "living on the edges." Mirrors: Recent Canadian Verse. Toronto: Gage, 1975.

• Psalms III, trans. and commentary by Mitchell Dahood. The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

• Second Isaiah, trans. and commentary by John L. McKenzie. The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

• Thornton, Russell. The Accurate Earth. Victoria, BC: Hawthorne Society/Reference West, 1997. N. pag.

• Williams, H. A. Becoming What I Am: A discussion of the methods and results of Christian prayer. London: Darton, Longman, 1977.