Our Winnowed Words
Bruce Beasley’s Prayershreds wrestles with language in hope of addressing divinity.
Review by Aarik Danielsen
Is prayer a dead language? The question buzzes around my inner ear, loud enough to overthrow my equilibrium, loud enough to drown out even the chance of meditation.
Tripping over God’s attributes, I feel my failure before attempting my address. Holiness knots my tongue; immanence drives me wild with doubt. If God sits close enough to read my thoughts, why must I say anything? What pious performance is this? And what I believe in with 98 percent confidence—grace, mercy, divine creativity—I understand at one one-thousandth of a percent, unable to articulate the gospel’s means or metaphysics. Surely prayer mystifies everyone; starting from this honestly hazy conviction sends me reeling.
At best, my prayers arrive in the “poor lisping, stammering tongue” of William Cowper’s hymnsong. More often, I catch myself muttering verses from The National at stoplights or in sanitized doctors’ offices, calling it sacred enough. I can’t get the balance right / With all my marbles in the fight.
In the opening lines of Prayershreds, poet Bruce Beasley rephrases the question as a statement—as a “Self-Portrait”—before asking the question to dance, before challenging the question to a duel: “I am words in a language I don’t speak / a dead one.”
The poem goes on, Beasley puzzling over the particulars of this language with its sounds “fricative like the spill / of candle wax over ice.” Maybe this dialect goes unspoken; maybe it’s as intelligible as translating an owl’s “talonprint” into “English even now.” By poem’s end, Beasley wonders how we might say anything at all. This is the way of Prayershreds: alternating bemusement and wonder, handling absurdity and beauty, diagramming prayer and breaking down its parts of speech in hope of discovering its secrets.
For all its humor—Prayershreds houses genuinely riotous moments—and shrugging shoulders, Beasley inches toward prayer with reverence. Sometimes he’s crawling on his belly. (“Approach It with appropriate fits of trembling,” the poem “Rite” counsels.) Sometimes he is sounding dissipating warnings, as in “Loathsome Repetition”: “Let us not battologize but alter the wounded text with corrections.” Yet the call to avoid wearied, wearying repetition gives way to the coal-scorched lips of Isaiah, the panting tongue of David, as Beasley rehearses his coda: “My soul is like earth without water for Thee.”
Sometimes prayer is pure appeal.
Laboring to correct the wounded text, to spell out the cry of the bruised soul, Beasley stares out at the vast, fertile country of his mother tongue. There are so many names for God, so many words for each reality, a poem like “Outside the Realm of Unconcealment” reminds us. Our words contain fragments of each other, approach common meaning, and send Beasley through image and implication until he directs prayers from “Lord Emmanuel” down to a sacred “woodchip-clogged 3/16” drill-hole.”
Sometimes prayer is pure appeal. (“O Lord I need you with a winnowed / word,” he confesses in “Aria.”) Sometimes it comes through formal tearing, cleaving letters and syllables to divulge the words within words, the revelation of unlikely elisions. Such gestures, seen in “Easterwards” and “Disconnected Limbs Wandered Seeking Everywhere for Union,” resemble no poetry or prayer we’d ever memorize; yet they perfectly recreate our imperfect grasping for God.
Beasley sprains his tongue and strains his eyes to form just the right words at just the right time. Ultimately, he shows, this scrutiny is for the one praying. With the poet, we wager that a God who answers to many names will accept all manner of supplication. But our prayers say something about us, do something in us, Beasley believes.
The poet’s searching travels in reverse, backing past God’s name and nature to his own. “Not Easily Pulled Asunder” considers the shape his prayers might take were he not Bruce Beasley, a poet from Macon, Georgia, but Bruce Beasley, the now 84-year-old California sculptor. Do two artists by the same name send complementary prayers heavenward? Or do they split one image before God?
Your vocabulary, you say, is shape and emptiness.
So’s mine: a scribble and a stroke
and left-white, then little
vowel-quaver, silence-quiver,
the said, the unsaid, and flitting
among them the meant, and what
it never meant
to mean, to turn
away from,
or into.
We may not control the ends of our prayers or fully manipulate the means. Our work lies in coming forward with all we have, the poet proposes with mixed despair and wonder. Echoing the prophets, “Last Supper with Maledictions” weighs both our words and the tools which bear them. Does holy writ preserved with seaweed ink and fish-skin paper mean any less if we devote the same elements to filling our stomachs? Are we only ever expressing one hunger? Even our concluding “amens” flex and falter, granting contour to our prayers but “ripping / the cut-out space of what we say to God / from the scrapped / silver silk of all we’d never say,” Beasley writes in “Verily. ”Some prayers stall; some end in sleep. “Verily” sits beside a child, swallowed by Sabbath slumber on this side of his pastor’s amen. “Called to Lapse” sets Beasley’s speaker in the disciples’ company, stretching their bodies across Gethsemane’s beds.
Each prayer is as unholy and holy as the next.
The poet’s best hope—and ours—lies in divine reciprocation. The God who sifts our shreds changes us by perfecting our tattered language, fulfilling our innate sentences. Chasing Luther, “And Though This World Should Threaten to Undo” defines language as “a torn hymnal, ripped sheet / music and severed” Latin phrases blowing round the room and out the window. Beasley scratches actual notes and staves into the poem, beseeching God to hum us until we enter his divine life:
Work us
(backslid and thrice-relapsed)
but work us weal, Your Mighty Highness, sight-sing
me bar by bar, sharp and flat, tempo maestoso,
slower and slow and sola fide
Beasley’s work is odd in every way, and thus oddly hopeful. He encourages us to keep at the language of prayer, maddening as it is, till even our beloved details dissolve and we relax into eternal conversation. “Little Faiths,” his closing poem, blesses us as we continue on our prayer journeys:
Whoever found your way here, go
on, go on, this is no place to dwell
among syllables and obfuscatory
wants that lurch and halt and fight
all unambiguous naming. Like a creek
self-purifying over stones
whose smoothness it creates
and then commends.
Prayer will never die as long as we ourselves live, Beasley suggests. The representative words—the very impulses themselves—are enough for the God of the infinite lexicon, who contains in Godself all words and worlds. Pray without ceasing, the apostle instructs. And we obey, even as we feel we’re doing anything but. Prayer arises as expletives and plosives, in quiet resignation and murmured dad-rock, as none or all of the above. Prayer collects itself from our cut-up construction paper syllables, wicks away from the soul, flickers with the frequency of a firefly’s existential questions.
Beasley’s poems model this reality: from the distant decimal place of our understanding, each prayer is as unnatural as translating bird prints into English, as natural as breathing. Each prayer is as unholy and holy as the next.
Aarik Danielsen is the arts and culture editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He writes The (Dis)content, a regular column for Fathom Magazine, and his work has appeared in Image Journal, Plough, Split Lip, Rain Taxi and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
Prayershreds was published by Orision Books on May 2, 2023. You can purchase a copy for yourself from the publisher here.
