The World is a Cathedral
Brown’s poems juxtapose the sacred and the everyday, situating both in real places ranging from the urban to the airborne.
Review by Abigail Carroll
In her book, City Nave, Betsy K. Brown invites us to join her, as it were, on a journey through a cathedral, leading us deeper into the heart of place and into the practice of release. This cathedral is not St. John the Divine, though it is referenced in a poem; nor is it Notre Dame. In fact, it is not a cathedral of stone and wood, but the cathedral that is at once the world and the heart.
In her poems’ treatment of place—often cities, and frequently New York—Brown offers a glimpse into always vibrant, sometimes enigmatic streetscapes and interiors that together form a map of meaning. In her “Ode to the Original Penn Station,” she notes, “Before the world / Widened, we built temples for all of our / Transitions.” In “Manhattan,” she describes riding the train with her eight-year-old daughter: “Around us the city roared like a storm. / The earth cried out. / Something was being born.”
As hinted at in these brief quotations, Brown’s engagement with place juxtaposes the mundane with the sacred, often showing them to be one and the same. Particularly resonant is her description of watching Christmas windows with her young daughter in the looming shadow of a dim, unlit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She writes: “From our clasped hands on this crux of street / Two roads branch out… / Into the place where sound and silence meet” (“To a Six-Year-Old on Fifth Avenue”). It’s as though in Brown’s poem the cruciform nature of reality is written into the landscape, a signaling of both grace and truth. For Brown, even Fifth Avenue is holy ground.
A keen observer of people, Brown populates her poems with saints, students, friends, relatives, at least one fictional character taken from literature, and the colorful crowds of New York and Paris. The book opens with a six-line vignette featuring young pagans at a picnic table who “scrawl inky runes into their hands / with cheap pens,” features kissing and Heineken-drinking loiters on the steps of Sacré Coeur “packed tight as pigeons,” and has cameo appearances by Saint Monica, Saint Joseph, and Dostoyevsky’s protagonist, Roskolnikov (“Today I will tape my essays to every naked pole / And hum another song of myself…”).
Brown’s characters breathe and often speak. Sometimes they are creatively transplanted to times and places they knew not in their actual or fictitious lifetimes. But most importantly, Brown dignifies them, places herself at their feet in order to learn from them, and invites us into that transformative encounter. A man wearing leg braces walking laps in the parking lot of the Abbey of Gethsemani becomes, in his limp, an object lesson on prayer. A troubled 14-year-old cutter becomes, in the context of the author’s injury, a Christ-like bearer of another’s scars. Reading these poems, it’s hard not to be reminded of Jesus’s prophetic words, “Many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first” (Matthew 19:30 NIV).
Most moving are Brown’s poems exploring relationship with close family members. “In Utero” imaginatively and bravely explores her own pre-term infancy. “What is this need to be birthed, to fall, to / know gravity for the first time?” Here, she hauntingly wrestles with what it means to be at once part of her mother and separate, a question that, as evidenced by the poem’s very existence, carries on long after birth, long after “the divide.” Her poem, “To My Brother-in-law in Kiev from a Plane over Texas” travels the tension of preserving a sense of human normalcy in the context of war. After a bomb explodes a hotel near where her brother-in-law lives, he texts to let her know he’s fine, sending pictures of himself with friends at a bar. On her night flight over Texas, she raises a New Year’s Ginger Ale toast across time and space. “It is already tomorrow in Kiev, and soon / It will be yesterday.” She closes the poem with another toast, a more profound toast, this one offered to the reader: “Here’s to / All the things that must break…”
Mixing formal poetry with free verse, City Nave likewise mixes the sacred and the mundane, turning cities into cathedrals and cathedrals into cities.
Planes figure prominently in Brown’s poems, offering the image of a noteworthy but ultimately manmade transcendence. In one poem, planes are “gods with wings that graze the sun.” In another, she writes with a touch of unease, “We sit still inside this speed.” Particularly moving is Brown’s poem “Turbulence,” in which she eulogizes a student who died in a winter plane crash. “I never quite know how to pray / For the dead. But I often try,” she writes. The more formal approach of this poem, which repeats the first line with variation for each of the five stanzas, produces a hypnotic effect that mimics the circularity of unresolved grief.
Early on in the collection, we stumble on a simple yet profound poem that introduces the theme the collection ultimately lands on. In “To a Ripe June Strawberry,” the author discovers a hole in a fat red strawberry and addresses the fruit: “Is this to remind me that even you cannot / Satisfy me?” In ensuing poems such as “Gaudete,” the theme of detachment surfaces—a trading of the jeweled life for the threadbare existence in order to guard the blessing of “whatever moth and rust cannot destroy.”
Furthering this theme, one of the finer poems in the collection is “Bird, Gift,” a palindrome that eloquently investigates in a simple economy of imagery the paradox of possessions. If one grasps tightly at a bird in hand, one loses it, but if one holds the hand open, allowing the bird to be free to leave and return at will, one can receive the bird as gift. The poem offers itself as a powerful parable, illuminating the well-known but hard-to-swallow words of Jesus: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Matthew 16:25–26 NIV). The collection’s closing poem, “Buying a House on the Feast of Saint Francis” brings this theme and the compilation to its delicate and compelling consummation.
Mixing formal poetry with free verse, City Nave likewise mixes the sacred and the mundane, turning cities into cathedrals and cathedrals into cities. It explores the sacramentality of human relationship, while nodding to the textures of everyday life. In the end, it teaches us what it looks like to lean into a life that, while lived in the idiom of things, isn’t ultimately about things. With each poem we become like the mother in “Untangling” who works patiently and joyfully to separate tangled necklaces. “For hours she untwists.” When we arrive at the end of the compilation, the poems may be complete, but in the light of their wisdom, we realize, “There is still more to undo.”
Abigail Carroll is author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days like Water, Habitation of Wonder, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have been anthologized in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope as well as in Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. Her work of nonfiction, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, was a finalist for the Zócolo Public Square Prize. She lives and writes in Vermont. Find her at www.abigail-carroll.com.
City Nave: Poems was published by Resource Publications on May 9, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
