Jan Lee Ande
Review
by Janet McCann
Jan Lee Ande's collection, winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize, is enlightened and enlightening Zen Christian poetry that combines precise observation with leaps of faith, hope, and love. These poems exemplify the sacramental vision that characterizes good Christian poetry, especially work in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. They are also concentrated, centered poems that seem to draw from Eastern meditative practice as well as from a Christian sensibility. The reader-friendly but intellectually complex poems are enhanced by a well of symbols and a sense of high fun. These poems do not deny the weight of the world but rather attempt by various means, physical and metaphysical, to lift it. Indeed, a lot of lifting and rising goes on in the book--physical raising and spiritual ascensions. Lifts that are only hoped for or hinted at. The poems are full of subtle wings.
The religious themes are always fully bodied and translucently clothed. Eden is a real garden. God creates humankind of, not separate from, nature. "Enoch Tells the Secrets of the Sixth Day" includes a richly nature-laced account of the Creation:
Bones were built of stone-marble, flint, and slate,
and the long bones stuffed with marrow,
Man's intellect was taken from the swiftness of angels
and gauzy clouds skimming the earth.
Veins and hair were formed
from the thin bodied grasses,
hollowed out and strung together. The soul
was made of God's breath blown down a strawblade
along the lean body of the wind. (10)
The four sections of the book--"The Needle's Eye," "Tumbling
in the Bower," "Reading the Clues," and "Illusions
of the Body"--provide a rough thematic grouping, but the poems generally
keep to the same overall theme concerning God's presence in nature and
the how one may read God through that book. A fascinating poem in the
second section is "Dream of the Rood," which uses some material
directly from the Old English manuscript but gives the ending a particular
Andean spin. The original poem fascinates for its startling originality
of perspective. It is a dream-narrative in which the Crucifixion is described
to the dreamer by the Cross, in words that express an ideal Christian
devotion: "He wished to climb on me/ ... I dared not bow or break
contrary to the Lord's word ... / I trembled when the Warrior embraced
me ... / They drove through me with iron nails ... / One buried us in
a deep pit. But there the Lord's servants, / his friends found me by searching,
/ adorned me with gold and silver." At the end of the original poem
the dreamer awakes and goes out to live his life enlightened by the Cross
to tell its story. Ande uses many of the images from the original poem
in her retelling, but she confines the narrative voice to that of the
Cross, which has gone through history as a sacred and sometimes exploited
part of the Christian tradition:
When the One Man laid his arm
along my crossbar, when he embraced me
like a bridegroom, I dared not droop
or bend. The spiked nails burrowed
through us and we did not fall.
... There I swayed
between gilded and bloodied
between glory and sorrow. I do not mind
the parings and carvings, relics
enough to fit a ship's hold,
for my form will never lessen.
I do not need a dreamer to speak for me.
Put your ear to the trunk of any tree, and listen. (33-34)
This poem is enriched by the reading of the original, and Ande's twist
seems startlingly "right."
There are high spirits in the book, particularly in the sequence "Seven Ways of Divination," which explores the possibility of achieving knowledge through the study of fig leaves, barley, eggs, cheese, and the behavior of cats. Generally, however, transcendence and the need for it that illuminate this collection are hard-won; this is not a poetry of easy answers. The poems exhibit all kinds of lightness and light, but the denials of gravity and dark are learned and practiced, not merely found. There are instructions for walking on water. There are rules to be followed, rules for reading nature, that bring one closer to God. Death is a constant presence, and it too has its conventions, the following of which may bring a realization that the cosmos has unrecognized dimensions.
"Telling the Bees" refers to the old custom that the bees must be told that the beekeeper has died. The teller is a child, who does get a kind of confused closure from her act:
She loves the bees' gift for music, their operatic
buzzing and dancing, the slowbellied tumble
toward nectar, and what he told her, how bees are shells
for the souls of the dead.
She spends long hours lying
in the field,
staring up through green leaves filled with leafblood,
wondering which humming body might be his. (80)
These are poems that shimmer and dance, that lift the mind and spirit
of the reader.
Review from Christianity and
Literature, Spring 2002, pp. 512-14. Janet McCann's work has appeared
in Southern Poetry Review, Parnassus, and elsewhere. She teaches at Texas
A & M University.
© Jan Lee Ande 2007