Instructions for Walking on WaterReviewed by Sandy McKinney
Instructions for Walking on Water, Poems by Jan Lee Ande, just released this April, was last year's winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. It's easy to see why this collection was a contest winner. I know of no other work with such an exciting combination of whimsy and awe, and such a joyful celebration of the magic tucked away in the folds of the commonplace. Here is a poet who is both discoverer and creator of her own mysteries. The poems are arranged in four divisions, each with a covering title. The works in each division hold together like the sections of a tangy esoteric grapefruit, but capable of being separated and examined singly with no loss of the overall flavor. "The Needle's Eye," Section One, offers poems as delicate and savory as canapés at a celestial cocktail party, where God — although not the host — is clearly an honored guest, even mentioned rashly by name. There is an overriding sense of spiritual confidence here that refuses to be squashed into doctrinaire religious categories. For example, in "Enoch Tells the Secrets of the Sixth Day" the Creation is displayed as a romp, with "squid spurting their dark ink" — "the sky peppered with ravens and crows" — "crawling things . . . nudging the grasses with snuffling noses" where — "eyes were plucked from the sun and pushed/ into the sockets like fallen embers." In the final strophe, the narrator longs "to warn the Creator, saying: /make the woman first, let her prevent what will become/ a miserable dominion over the earth." In Section Two, "Tumbling in the Bower," we are treated, along with a view of Adam and Eve "tumbling in the bower/ on a bed of pink lobelia," to the impudent intrusion of the flesh into realms traditionally held to be sacrosanct: the confessional (where the penitent offers "to give details of long nights grasping for a vision/ of God, the foul words that flew . . . " to a priest who "had no need for more stories and the tedious/ articles of despair") — the mystical, where Rilke's angels are "felt as the shudder of a beating wing/ a terribly astonished breath." — the bones of the Buddha, who "must have been weary of preaching the dharma/ to whores, kings, and thieves" — the very bloodsap of the rood, that waited "among worms and rootstock" for four hundred years and which, even having been dug up and glorified, warns the reader that "I do not need a dreamer to speak for me./ Put your ear to the trunk of any tree and listen." The third and fourth sections become somewhat more complex, but never less airy and permeable. There is a breadth of vision here, clearly springing from formidable scholarship, by an intrepid voyager through landscapes of earth and visions of heaven. The range widens, the glass becomes at once more long-ranging and still more pitilessly focused. Don't try to read this book all at one sitting. Enjoy each poem over and over again, testing its uniqueness in tiny nibbles, as though it were the only piece of genuine marzipan you're going to get this year. Then when you've digested the whole thing, don't just leave it on the shelf like any common read. Hide it where you'll come upon it in unexpected moments, waiting for you there like trickles of clear, pure water on a blistering day. Ms. Ande lives in La Jolla, California, and teaches at The Union Institute. Here's a link which will tell you more about the book and the poet, with instructions for ordering: http://www.poetrywriter.com/ Sandy McKinney, 2001 |