A Liturgy for Stones
by David Wright
Cascadia Publishing House
ISBN 1-931038-13-9

lurbs on the back of David Wright's new book suggest that his eloquent voice will carry us upward into a realm of spiritual rarity where the very silence sings of holiness. Of more interest, perhaps, is the emergence of a writer who reveals himself in a kaleidoscopic bouncing between rest and activity to be intensely, sometimes cautiously, sometimes overly, but always forgivably human.

Here is a poet who is not embarrassed to declare his faith nor to poke a little gentle fun at its earthly vehicle: black footprints from the pastor's shoes on the floor of the baptismal tank; a poem about a skit by two obviously paterfamilias types in drag at the church bazaar. Especially engaging is a scene from the Sunday School, beginning with

The children are angry 
The story is too sweet, 
too much about love . . . 

               . . . No 
prophet's head offered

on a king's platter like a giant 
frightened apple. No one suffers

God's wrath . . . 

and ending with a mother whose son

              grins, 
kicks, grins, kicks, until she clears 
the steps in a terrible blur to collect him

She contains his flailing limbs in a sweep 
of her long mother's arms. He tries

to cry, but she smothers his voice 
in her own flowered breast.

The children sit still.

They have glimpsed God's mighty arms 
filled with their brother, have seen God's

long reach. They believe God's hands 
could gather them up for good.

In poet Wright, we meet a specific, individual four-dimensional human being who offers us vignettes of himself in time: bearded in front of the Sunday morning mirror, standing at a river's edge teaching his four-year-old daughter to swim and plunging first into the terror that she might drown, next facing the future terror of losing her to another man, perhaps the wrong man.

These poems are not easy, but there is enough emotional, psychological, linguistic, and maybe even spiritual weight to repay a serious effort to penetrate them to their deepest level. The easy ear of the poet helps, with generous helpings of hard rhyme, slant rhyme, and an assonance as natural as birdsong or the ingenuous speech of beasts.

"A Liturgy for Stones," the long title poem in eight sections at the center of the book, has the quality of a new Book of Revelations: powerful, scary, passionate, and filled with a shrill, fanciful allegory resolved in "a terrible holiness, a lush and delicate calm."

For most readers, this collection will have been launched by an unfamiliar press, an encouraging sign that for our rapidly growing population of new poets, PoBiz is moving out of the marketplace dominated by the big trade publishers and through an increasing number of small presses into the hands of the poets themselves and their readers — the other half of a new relationship that seems to be proposing the unthought-of idea of eliminating the middleman and offering an invitation for every voice to sing. Wright's volume is available through the publisher or from Amazon.com.

© Sandy McKinney