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Jan
Lee Ande's prize winning book, Instructions for Walking on Water,
was the first glimpse of a woman who is in miraculously close touch with
the inner turnings of the world. In her second book, Reliquary, winner
of the X.J. Kennedy Prize from Texas Review Press, the poet again hints
in her title of something holy. Ande's book is itself a reliquary, a container
of holy remnants. She casts her eye on the everyday occurrences that bless
us, often without our knowing. Her writing is alive with the living, and,
at the same time, alive with the dying. It is the breathless into which
she breathes, the living whom she approaches with reverie. She stops to
attend to a homeless man on the street and to a dying father, lending even
death a resurrectional quality, " . . . as he passed from sunlight
into shade, the first inexorable sign of his leaving," from "Directives
for the Afterworld." In her endings, there are beginnings. She takes
on the web of life as subject matter, attentive to trees, creatures, humans,
stars, Whitmanian in her insight. In this collection, everything partakes
of wholeness, as she writes in "Permeable Membrane." "All
around us, in the aimless fiddling / between us, an opening to light and
air, / a peculiar sort of oneness."
If the world were to come to
an end and begin again it might be a small stone with a mouth. Then it
would be trees: 'sequoia, redwood, banyan.' Jan Lee Ande creates a new
world in Reliquary, 'the words thick as leafbuds on your tongue."
In "Sitting Under the Bo Tree" she sees herself as 'another
person.of another mind,' and is seized by 'a kind of rapturous delight.'
Things say to her, 'I am that, I too am that.' She speaks of the unseen,
'quarks with strangeness and charm,' but like the Indian in one of her
poems she also thinks with the heart.' I do not know a more moving poem
than Ande's about 'a tiny pink thing / no bigger than my thumbnail, like
an itty bitty rat / but she was a daughter.' It has been said that 'writing
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' Ande says, 'Still, somewhere inside,
the voices keep whispering / the ordinary prayers of this human soul.'
Elizabeth Bishop would have loved these poems. So would William Blake.
-Louis
Simpson, Series Judge
© Jan Lee Ande
2007
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