Review Essay: Ordinary Glory: The Art of Breaking Bread with the Dead, Epiphanies, Morning Knowledge, Reading God's Handwriting

Epiphanies. Kim Bridgford. Cincinnati, OH: David Roberts Books, 2013. Pp. 53. Morning Knowledge. Kevin Hart. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2011. Pp. 86. Reading God's Handwriting. Philip C. Kolin. St. Simon's Island, GA: Kaufmann Publishing, 2012. Pp. 105. My dead are shining like washed gold. Like gold from what-you-will freed: cobwebs, mold, rust, the anonymous mud-and plunged in the icy waver of water to flash at the hot sun. They come shining happily inside a moment translated only now so long after. They arrive in the comfort of comrades and a nimbus of silence. Accurate and able they shine in ordinary glory cleared from the clock's confusion that held them distant, aghast. --Josephine Jacobsen, "The Arrivals" W. H. Auden once famously claimed "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead" He also added, "without communion with the dead, a fully human life is impossible." Three recent books of poems provide powerful witness to the truth of Auden's assertions. Kevin Hart's Morning Knowledge is a collection of elegies wherein the poet movingly encounters his dead, finding them in odd places at odd moments of his day--his mother in his study one evening on the anniversary of her passing, an old friend and fellow poet one afternoon in the thick of summer light, and, most often, his father who comes on random windy nights to bid his son goodnight. Kim Bridgford's Epiphanies creates communion with the historical and the mythic dead. Old Testament figures, such as Noah, Sarah, Moses, and Job, and New Testament characters, including Mary and Joseph, Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, and Christ himself, speak eloquently in these pages, offering intimate accounts of their encounters with the Holy of Holies and their struggle against human error and limitation. Despite their fame and pedigree, these august presences sound, for all the world, like ourselves. Philip C. Kolin's poems in Reading God's Handwriting engage both the celebrated and the obscure dead. The narratives and soliloquies of the biblical figures featured in these poems are interspersed with those of ordinary men and women, friends and family the poet honors and remembers by putting their stories next to those of seers and saints. Each of these books is deeply moving in its way, courageous in the poet's willingness to conjure the dead, imaginative in its depiction of them in their "ordinary glory" and generous in its impulse to give the reader access to the "fully human life" that poetry at its best provides. Morning Knowledge is Kevin Hart's ninth book of poems. Lauded as "the most outstanding Australian poet of his generation" and "one of the major living poets in the English language" Hart is also a chaired professor of theology, philosophy, and literature at the University of Virginia and at the Australian Catholic University. Hart's poems are grounded in deep learning, yet the poet manages to wear that learning lightly. The evocative and multivalent title of the book suggests the theological idea conceived by St. Augustine and further elaborated on by St. Thomas Aquinas, that of "morning knowledge" as knowledge in potentia, by means of the word rather than through experience. As such it is imperfect or incomplete knowledge. This is a theme Hart sounds throughout his poems--the inadequacy of language to speak the unspeakable, the unrelenting search for the right words despite the impossibility of finding them, and, most poignantly, the silence of God (whom Hart addresses, notably, as "Dark One") who speaks to us in words we can neither hear nor understand: Leaves shine with birdsong, and the dead are calm. Ah Dark One, let me hear you speak to me-- Inside half-buried words, if that must be, Words left in books where they can do no harm. Or words that open so that I might see A summer farmland where fine light is grain And grows straight up to where fierce seraphs reign. …