{"id":5492,"date":"2022-05-11T14:29:27","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T14:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=5492"},"modified":"2022-05-11T14:29:33","modified_gmt":"2022-05-11T14:29:33","slug":"bower-lodge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/11\/bower-lodge\/","title":{"rendered":"Bower Lodge"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Shelter in the Waste Land<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In Bower Lodge, <\/em>we are dealing with a poet who has traced the words and worlds of others for a long time before putting pen to paper himself.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By J. C. Scharl<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I have never yet been asked to review a book that I ended up disliking. That is still the case after reading Paul Pastor\u2019s debut poetry collection, Bower Lodge,<\/em> an unusual collection in that it exists in an explicitly \u201cbuilt world.\u201d It is more like a fairy tale than the memoir-esque world we are accustomed to in contemporary poetry. Before each section we find a brief poetic description of the setting; these tiny poems reminded me of nothing quite so much as of George MacDonald\u2019s Phantastes. <\/em>Take the first lines of the preface to Section One: \u201cbeing words \/ written as the beloved Wanderer \/sought the unwelcome sleep of Bower Lodge, \/ hand in hand with a lovely and implacable Embalmer\u2026\u201d<\/p>

That \u201clovely and implacable Embalmer,\u201d if you permit me a slight flight of fancy, could indeed be Boethius\u2019s Lady Philosophy (who is nothing if not implacable, and seems rather alarmingly comfortable with the idea of the death of the individual). Or she could be Eve from MacDonald\u2019s Lilith, <\/em>who watches over the death-sleep of all her children. Or she could be Sophia, the Lady-Figure of Salvation who will let nothing slip through her fingers\u2026<\/p>

I could go on. The point is that there are many streams trickling into the pool that is Bower Lodge; <\/em>we are dealing with a poet who has traced the words and worlds of others for a long time before putting pen to paper himself. That is the holy order of things. I think of the encounter in C. S. Lewis\u2019s The Great Divorce <\/em>between the ghost of an artist and the Hallow of an Artist; the difference between the damned spirit and the holy one is that the holy one has learned to be content to see. <\/em>The damned artist insists on leaping straight into making, without first coming to deep knowledge\u2014and love\u2014of what has already been made.<\/p>

Pastor has done the work of seeing. Tracery of other writers gleams out throughout the collection. <\/em>In \u201cHold,\u201d I hear W. S. Merwin\u2019s voice in \u201cThis one\u2019s a pen \/ that makes words disappear\u201d; Franz Wright\u2019s in \u201cThe Sea, The Tower\u201d (\u201cDo waves weep as they die on the shore \/ with laughter, with the wine-dark hymns?\u201d). The anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight<\/em> speaks in the closing stanza of \u201cThe Green Chapel\u201d:<\/p>


\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u2026for when I was one year younger and a day,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I held the heavy axe and brought it down,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 And in the final moment as skin and sinew tore,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I heard a voice I knew:
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Welcome friend. It\u2019s only you you\u2019re striking.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>

Seamus Heaney hides behind the bony clicks and kenning(s?) of \u201cclick crack \/ blood sap \/ joint back \/ man tree from a bone seed.\u201d Derek Walcott might have liked \u201chow it would feel \/ to hunt some younger god,\u201d and Vladimir Nabokov would certainly appreciate the closing lines of that poem. Hopkins glories as \u201cIce of Eden \/ bobs in the glass-green brine pitching fits, \/ yawing yawned lessenings.\u201d And of course, MacDonald is everywhere.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Pastor is no foolish Whitmanesque adolescent, and his mastery of one vexatious word proves that point. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The collection works because these signs appear only as tracery. The poems here are delicately allusive. If I did not know these writers, I could still walk toward Bower Lodge with the Wanderer.<\/p>

Yet there are other ways for a poet to work with all he has seen. For contrast, look to the mammoths of twentieth-century poetry Geoffrey Hill, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, David Jones: all prodigiously well-acquainted with \u201call the best that has been thought and said,\u201d and unafraid of writing from the top of the mountain, as it were. These poets sit on a heap of beautiful things collected from far and wide, and they say, \u201cCome up and see what we have seen!\u201d They make it seem good up there. But it is a long, weary slog to join them.<\/p>

All of these gigantic poets were poets of the waste land, and so, I think, is Pastor. But he takes a different path through. He walks the path of burying what he has seen very deeply and then inviting us to come look at what has bloomed.<\/p>

We see this image in the first poem of Bower Lodge. <\/em>There, we read, \u201cYou are not only what is seen. \/ You are like what happens when \/ a desert shifted in a lost land, \/ like a pyramid long swallowed \/ by fine sand. [\u2026] but \/ underfoot \/ you lie entire.\u201d This is a new way to imagine the waste land. We are not kings who stride across it; rather, we are civilizations stuck beneath its surface.<\/p>

I like the idea that restoring the waste land means restoring myself. In \u201cGone to Ground,\u201d losing one\u2019s edge becomes (pardon) a double-edged sword: \u201cPeople asked where I was, but I\u2019d lost my edge. \/ I got puzzled stares. I lost my edge.\u201d But it also means being able to draw nearer to the slow things, the deep things: \u201cI thought before I spoke\u2014lost my edge. \/ Dreamed slow useless things and lost my edge. Became stories, not sermons.\u201d<\/p>

I hope countless people read Pastor\u2019s book. I do not hope that many will imitate it\u2014not, at least, without taking the time to grasp the difficulties inherent in his style. Many poets are called \u201cWhitmanesque,\u201d and Pastor is among them, but not many deserve it.<\/p>

I do not like Whitman for many reasons. His particular style of extravagance, nonhierarchical and uncritical, offends my medieval sensibilities. In the Great Dichotomy of American verse, my sympathies are with Miss Dickinson. That is partly because of the illusion of ease within Whitman\u2019s style, which continues to lure passionate imitators into trespass and presumption. Emily\u2019s Verses have the Ease that is the hallmark of great Art (\u201cThere\u2019s a certain slant of light\u201d is unmatched in American poetry for both readability and skill), but give a young poet fifteen minutes to try to imitate her and the illusion will be dispelled. Whitman can fool us for much longer, and to our shame.<\/p>

Pastor knows all this, of course. He is no foolish Whitmanesque adolescent, and his mastery of one vexatious word proves my point. I\u2019ve already quoted the stylistic thing I\u00a0 do not like that Pastor shares with Whitman: the use of the second person.<\/p>

That little \u201cyou\u201d repeatedly pops up in the book, in at least one of three poems, probably more (I didn\u2019t count). It is a troublesome little word, one that tempts aspiring poets mightily. What can be better than to address the reader directly? <\/em>says the youthful poet. How better to draw a reader in? <\/em><\/p>

But \u201cyou\u201d is a trap, a sinkhole into which dying poems fall and perish. \u201cYou,\u201d sloppily employed, means nothing; it indicates that the poet has not considered what his poem is about. The \u201cyou\u201d is some unexamined depth of himself. Only the examined depths of the poet\u2019s soul can bear the light, and upon examination often turn out to be less interesting than we thought. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

When Pastor uses the word \u201cyou,\u201d it is almost always clear from the language of the poem who\u2014or what\u2014he is speaking to. \u201cThorn of my thorn, branch of my branch, \/ what brought you to the river\u2026?\u201d Clearly, the thorn. Or in \u201cTo an Arch Enemy,\u201d \u201cIf you let me see you, let me\u2026\u201d, clearly \u201cyou\u201d is the arch enemy. \u201cOh, heart beholding\/yourself,\u201d obvious.<\/p>

These are not dissociative \u201cyous\u201d flung into the void of the self. But imitators of Pastor beware: you must know yourself to write this way, and the road to that knowledge leads through Death. The Wanderer of Bower Lodge <\/em>can speak this way because he has reached out and touched the bedrock beneath our feet, and that bedrock is grief, and loss, and devastation.<\/p>

It is only after seeing this devastation within and without one\u2019s own self that one can write with any kind of assurance or ethos the words that close this lovely book: \u201cyou will \/go in peace.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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J. C. Scharl <\/strong>is a poet, editor, and critic. Her poetry has been featured in\u00a0<\/em>New Ohio Review,\u00a0<\/em>Classical Outlook,\u00a0<\/em>Measure Review,\u00a0<\/em>The American Journal of Poetry,\u00a0<\/em>Dappled Things,\u00a0<\/em>Plough Quarterly,\u00a0<\/em>Fare Forward, and\u00a0<\/em>Euphony Journal(among many others). Her criticism has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Plough Quarterly,\u00a0<\/em>Dappled Things, and others.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Bower Lodge<\/strong> was published by Fernwood Press in December 2021. You can purchase a copy via their website here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Bower Lodge, we are dealing with a poet who has traced the words and worlds of others for a long time before putting pen to paper 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