The Road to Emmaus: Poems
The most exceptional poems in this engaging collection are long and not just personal but autobiographical. The Road to Emmaus is about two men on the same journey, himself when young and his much older AA sponsor. We see Reece in counseling with an elderly nun, recalling his sole love relationship, which began when he was 39 and Joseph was 50 and lasted five years. In the prose poem, Hartford, ­Reece, older yet, is a hospital chaplain in the city of his birth, pondering the Jewish past of his mother’s family and traces of Wallace Stevens, Hartford’s great resident poet when it was a WASP, not a black, metropolis. And in The Upper Room, Reece shows himself studying in middle age for the Episcopal priesthood—his second crack at it, successful this time, though he is wracked by a wave of deaths in his family. With their allusive titles and citations, all four conjure a gritty world scarred by disruptions good (gay liberation) and bad (urban poverty, violence, madness) yet suffused with poetry, love, and the Gospel. --Ray Olson