Reading Brief Light in Advent

It came, it came! A present for me!  ‘Tis the season for packages, but most of the ones arriving are surprises I’ve ordered for someone else.  A few days ago, a large envelope arrived for me. It’s always so exciting to get a package in the mail. This one contained SallyThomas’ new book of poems, Brief Light.  Happily, my expectations of something satisfying were fulfilled.

The title seems appropriate for Advent, a season of short, gray days, and several, if not most, of the poems are wintry in setting and sometimes in tone, for instance, as in “Copperhead” when the hermit kills the snake, and in “Acedia,” in which the title turns the listlessness expressed in the poem into a spiritual struggle. In “Poem” there is a “winter of your books.”  Not only are daylight hours in Advent brief, but the season itself is brief: the cheery candles and Christmas lights are usually torn down before New Year’s. And brief, too, are the moments of inner light that these poems expose. As the busyness of the season threatens to overwhelm, occasional moments, like when the candles are lit before Mass, or during a reading at Lessons and Carols, provide brief opportunities for reflection and enlightenment, and a fleeting glimpse of grace. And that’s what these poems bestow: little glimpses of something extraordinary in the everyday.

Although there’s a poem for Ash Wednesday, one for Advent, one for Christmas, most of these poems are about ordinary time. I find myself using liturgical language here, but most of the poems aren’t overtly Christian, and they are anything but sentimental. The book includes poems that are about love and joy and grace, but also poems about loneliness, oddness, infidelity.  For instance, in “Tornado Watch,” a dog looks pleadingly for protection from the storm, but nothing can turn the path of the storm: “What can I do?” However, the line could be read, not as an excuse for failing to provide protection, but in a tone that suggests “my powers are nothing compared to the awesome mightiness of nature.”

In “Introvert” the husband’s love has been unable “to expose the secret soul,” which he thought would be like forcing blooms at Christmastime. And yet, for 20 years he has been trying to know his wife, although he comes to“loves her inwardness, the private glance / Like a sunrise from her heart.”  I like that acceptance of mystery, as opposed to the modern cry of surrender: “He doesn’t know me!” The recognition that, even after years of intimacy, we fail to know one another doesn’t negate love, but perhaps strengthens it.

The book is full of short poems that affirm the mysterious workings of love. Some of my favorite lines: from “For You,” which answers a child’s question “Am I your favorite?” with “You stand before me, asking that my heart / Declare, You first, you always. And it’s true. / It works this way. Love’s strange, elastic laws / Grant each child its undiluted part, / and that, my love, is what I offer you.”

I like the image of a person looking at her home from outside in at night, who notices happiness in the glow of “Lamplight.” And the idea that nothing stirs but “my heart” under the keen eye of a falcon in winter.

I love the juxtaposition of beauty and strangeness in the closing lines of “Frost”: “Tricky winter light and my own eye / Bending the world, if not to beauty, then / Strangeness, on which the cold sun / Shines, and the grass shines back like knives.”

I like the humorous imagery of “Laundromat” with “the woman whose bedroom slippers slap / Linoleum the way she’d like to slap / You, when you’ve let your clothes pool / Five seconds to long at the bottom / Of the dryer.”

But I think my favorite is “Anniversary”: “Still, this morning I’m so grateful / You’ve pinned your socks together for the wash, / I’d dress up now and marry you again.” My husband doesn’t pin his socks, but he does perform so many small ministrations out of love and generosity that I frequently am reminded of how much I love him and how undeserving I am of his love.

I think my students would like these poems, too. As I mentioned a couple posts ago, they got a little tired of all the modern poetry about alienation and isolation.  Sally’s poems don’t shy away from alienation, but they also note connections. Like in “New Year,” one voice recognizes “Another year gone,” but the other responds “Another year begun.”  Life goes on, winter is only a brief period of dormancy before Spring’s rebirth, and that’s a good thing, not a source of angst.

Plus, I love the photo on the front cover. It may actually be England, but it reminds me of one of the chilly, foggy mornings in the Midwestern farmland where I grew up.