The Answer is Love
Spencer Reece’s long-awaited third poetry collection weaves his life in Spain with the questions we all ask about how we can possibly live in this world of ours.
Review by Todd Osborne
My copy of Spencer Reece’s Acts, his third poetry collection and his first in ten years, is filled with scribbled notes—translations, references, notes to self, underlined sections, scrawled stars by particularly strong lines. The notes are a text all on their own, my own way of writing back to Reece in some small way. This particular collection invites this kind of epistolary feeling. Acts details a period in Reece’s life when he lived in Madrid, and it is concerned with letter-writing, both Reece’s own practice and the way that letter-writing is itself an act that begins with the New Testament, a text to which Reece has devoted much of his life.
And yet, the poems in this collection never feel weighed down by too much religious fervor. Reece is concerned not only with his spirit, but with his body as well, specifically his queer body and how it does or does not fit into the Church’s ideas of what should or should not be considered holy. Reece flits between two modes in the collection: epistolary poems with languid lines that almost seem as if they are not enjambed—these poems saunter their way down the page, take a midday nap, are unbothered—and poems that prance prettily with short, to-the-point lines, as in the poem “Stille Nacht”:
Lo
a man
spits
on a man
splits
him
open
like a Bible
And what can a careful reader do but gasp at such an audacious set of lines? This is not the religious poetry of Herbert or Berryman, though both make an appearance in their own way (early on, Reece writes, “Martyrdom bores me.”). Reece wants faith to be a lived experience, not a merely cerebral or even spiritual one. In the New Testament, Acts is, after all, short for Acts of the Apostles, whether those acts be proselytizing, communing with each other, or yes, becoming the very martyrs that Reece claims to be bored of.
After reading the collection long enough, it becomes clear, however, that Reece is not entirely sincere in that statement. Martyrs of a sort crop up throughout the collection. Mostly, Reece is concerned with those poets who were killed during the years of the Spanish Civil War and after by the fascist government led by Francisco Franco: Federico Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, and even writers like Luis Cernuda who were forced to leave Spain after Franco’s rise to avoid persecution. These writers haunt the pages of Acts, with Reece often speaking directly to these Spanish forebears. He talks frankly about their own martyrdom at the hands of the Franco regime, and it is hard not to feel the timeliness of these poems, as fascism continues to rear its head across the globe, and many states in America seem determined to help its rise while also trying to eliminate discussions or even the existence of queer people like Reece.
These are poems concerned with the small things, the simple acts of a person’s life, and how they can accumulate.
Of course, like any good poet with a religious concern, one of Reece’s recurring themes is love. There is discussion of romantic love, with Reece lamenting that his boyfriend Manuel breaks up with him because “he was not out.” At other parts in the book, Reece makes strong statements about love: “Love is best when not my idea,” “About love I will no longer be frugal,” and “Whatever the question the answer is love.” This last idea, which appears in his long poem “Letters from Spain,” finds its corollary near the end of the book when Reece writes, “Whatever / the crisis / the answer / is love.”
By the end, this seemingly declaratory statement, written in one long-ish line, has been chopped up. Reece has grieved the end of a relationship, the illness and death of parents, and the loss of those he wrote letters to (a practice that feels almost spiritual throughout the collection), and his own loss of his position in Spain. For Reece, the answer, though not a simple one by any means, is still love. Not the oft-quoted, simple love of 1 Corinthians 13, but a hard-fought, hard-won love that yes, hopes and believes all things, not out of ignorance, but because it has experienced all that the world has to offer—its lofty joys and its deep sorrows—and realized that the only way forward, no matter the crisis, is love.
Near the beginning of the collection, Reece writes, “I don’t want to make mistakes—but Lord / I make them,” a kind of prayer that hangs over the rest of the poems. These are poems concerned with the small things, the simple acts of a person’s life, and how they can accumulate. There is an accounting of time throughout the poems as well, as if by keeping track of the time, Reece can better recall the specific moments he is trying to render. The idea of Ordinary Time—those parts of the year that fall outside of the holy seasons of Lent or Advent—is present in the book, and perhaps is the best way to make sense of what Reece is trying to celebrate in these poems. Time that is both Ordinary and ordinary—religious fervor that is at once devotional and customary, that follows Paul’s dictum to “pray without ceasing,” the kind of prayer that becomes part and parcel with each motion that the devotee makes.
In a time of crisis, in a world beset by so much horror, Reece, presented with and then presenting the cruelties of the Spaniards who conquered America, makes this claim: “for poetry is the opposite of cruelty.” In these poems, Reece shows the truth of that. His poems are tender and open-hearted. For the reader who has become inured to violence and death in all its forms—genocide on our phone-screens, rampant homophobia and transphobia in our land, the terrors both large and small that greet us every day with renewed hatred—Reece offers a place to confront all of that and to reject it. To choose faith and love when everything seems to speak against it, that is Reece’s objective, and his poems revel in these twin ideals. He even recognizes that poetry, ultimately, will not save us. Only we, in community with one another like the Apostles themselves, can save us. In a moment of seeming lost-ness, Reece reminds the reader what this is all for: “When there are no words, there are only acts.”
Todd Osborne is a teacher and the author of the poetry collection Gatherer, which is out now from Belle Point Press. His poems have appeared at CutBank, Big Muddy, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their three cats.
Acts: Poems was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 28, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can buy a copy from the publisher here.
