{"id":9849,"date":"2024-09-04T15:48:53","date_gmt":"2024-09-04T15:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=9849"},"modified":"2024-09-05T14:38:24","modified_gmt":"2024-09-05T14:38:24","slug":"city-nave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/04\/city-nave\/","title":{"rendered":"City Nave"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The World is a Cathedral<\/h2>\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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Brown\u2019s poems juxtapose the sacred and the everyday, situating both in real places ranging from the urban to the airborne.<\/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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Review by Abigail Carroll<\/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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In her book, City Nave<\/em>, 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.<\/p>

In her poems\u2019 treatment of place\u2014often cities, and frequently New York\u2014Brown offers a glimpse into always vibrant, sometimes enigmatic streetscapes and interiors that together form a map of meaning. In her \u201cOde to the Original Penn Station,\u201d she notes, \u201cBefore the world \/ Widened, we built temples for all of our \/ Transitions.\u201d In \u201cManhattan,\u201d she describes riding the train with her eight-year-old daughter: \u201cAround us the city roared like a storm. \/ The earth cried out. \/ Something was being born.\u201d<\/p>

As hinted at in these brief quotations, Brown\u2019s 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\u2019s Cathedral. She writes: \u201cFrom our clasped hands on this crux of street \/ Two roads branch out… \/ Into the place where sound and silence meet\u201d (\u201cTo a Six-Year-Old on Fifth Avenue\u201d). It\u2019s as though in Brown\u2019s 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.<\/p>

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 \u201cscrawl inky runes into their hands \/ with cheap pens,\u201d features kissing and Heineken-drinking loiters on the steps of Sacr\u00e9 Coeur \u201cpacked tight as pigeons,\u201d and has cameo appearances by Saint Monica, Saint Joseph, and Dostoyevsky\u2019s protagonist, Roskolnikov (\u201cToday I will tape my essays to every naked pole \/ And hum another song of myself\u2026\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>

Brown\u2019s 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\u2019s injury, a Christ-like bearer of another\u2019s scars. Reading these poems, it\u2019s hard not to be reminded of Jesus\u2019s prophetic words, \u201cMany who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first\u201d (Matthew 19:30 NIV).<\/p>

Most moving are Brown\u2019s poems exploring relationship with close family members. \u201cIn Utero\u201d imaginatively and bravely explores her own pre-term infancy. \u201cWhat is this need to be birthed, to fall, to \/ know gravity for the first time?\u201d 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\u2019s very existence, carries on long after birth, long after \u201cthe divide.\u201d Her poem, \u201cTo My Brother-in-law in Kiev from a Plane over Texas\u201d 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\u2019s fine, sending pictures of himself with friends at a bar. On her night flight over Texas, she raises a New Year\u2019s Ginger Ale toast across time and space. \u201cIt is already tomorrow in Kiev, and soon \/ It will be yesterday.\u201d She closes the poem with another toast, a more profound toast, this one offered to the reader: \u201cHere\u2019s to \/ All the things that must break\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/div>\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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Mixing formal poetry with free verse, City Nave<\/em> likewise mixes the sacred and the mundane, turning cities into cathedrals and cathedrals into cities.<\/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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Planes figure prominently in Brown\u2019s poems, offering the image of a noteworthy but ultimately manmade transcendence. In one poem, planes are \u201cgods with wings that graze the sun.\u201d In another, she writes with a touch of unease, \u201cWe sit still inside this speed.\u201d Particularly moving is Brown\u2019s poem \u201cTurbulence,\u201d in which she eulogizes a student who died in a winter plane crash. \u201cI never quite know how to pray \/ For the dead. But I often try,\u201d 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.<\/p>

Early on in the collection, we stumble on a simple yet profound poem that introduces the theme the collection ultimately lands on. In \u201cTo a Ripe June Strawberry,\u201d the author discovers a hole in a fat red strawberry and addresses the fruit: \u201cIs this to remind me that even you cannot \/ Satisfy me?\u201d In ensuing poems such as \u201cGaudete<\/a>,\u201d the theme of detachment surfaces\u2014a trading of the jeweled life for the threadbare existence in order to guard the blessing of \u201cwhatever moth and rust cannot destroy.\u201d<\/p>

Furthering this theme, one of the finer poems in the collection is \u201cBird, Gift,\u201d 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: \u201c<\/sup><\/strong>For whoever wants to save their life\u00a0will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.\u00a0What 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?\u201d (Matthew 16:25\u201326 NIV). The collection\u2019s closing poem, \u201cBuying a House on the Feast of Saint Francis\u201d brings this theme and the compilation to its delicate and compelling consummation.<\/p>

Mixing formal poetry with free verse, City Nave<\/em> 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\u2019t ultimately about things. With each poem we become like the mother in \u201cUntangling\u201d who works patiently and joyfully to separate tangled necklaces. \u201cFor hours she untwists.\u201d When we arrive at the end of the compilation, the poems may be complete, but in the light of their wisdom, we realize, \u201cThere is still more to undo.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\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

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Abigail Carroll<\/strong> is author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days like Water,<\/em> Habitation of Wonder<\/em>, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. <\/em>Her poems have been anthologized in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope<\/em> as well as in Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide<\/em>. Her work of nonfiction, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal,<\/em> was a finalist for the Z\u00f3colo Public Square Prize. She lives and writes in Vermont. Find her at www.abigail-carroll.com<\/a>.<\/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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City Nave: Poems<\/strong> was published by Resource Publications on May 9, 2024. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>

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Brown\u2019s poems juxtapose the sacred and the everyday, situating both in real places ranging from the urban to the airborne. Review by Abigail 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