I recently started watching Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting, a show that appeared on the BBC in 1997. In this show, nun Sister Wendy explores various artistic movements. The format of the show is almost too simple to work. She stands in an art gallery beside historically significant works of art and describes them with simplistic eloquence, revealing what is so plainly on the canvas. The brilliance of the show is that Sister Wendy not only invites the viewer to pay close attention to each brushstroke—her vision has become their vision and in this way, she lends the viewer her eyesight. And so it is with Susan McCaslin’s book of poetry, Consider. Her poems do what good poetry so often does—cleanses the lens of our own smudged vision and offers us the poet’s finely sharpened gift of sight.
This borrowed sight, both playful and surprising, is evident in the first section of Consider, titled “Cosmic Egg.” McCaslin begins with the following epigraph from H. D., “The Flowering of the Rod.”
The Christos-image
Is most difficult to disentangle
From its art-craft junk-shop
Paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
Of pain-worship and death symbol …
In this section, McCaslin’s poems reimagine the Christ image. Some poems place the gospel stories within the poet’s own context where Golden Ears peaks in Canada become the site of the Transfiguration. In other poems, Jesus is in conversation with Gandhi, Buddha and Muhammad. In yet another, Jesus and Rumi speak, and Rumi expresses his adoration for the stories of Yeshua. In one particularly playful poem, McCaslin writes a dating profile for Jesus:
If Yeshua Had a Bumble Profile
Original Plenty-of-Fish guy
seeking long-term relationship
Into mindfulness meditation aromatherapy
peace activism Loves fishing mountain-climbing
unusual water sports
communal feasts with wine and intimate conversation
Would rather listen to sparrows than tweet inanities
In the section titled “Cosmic Egg,” McCaslin unsettles the historical images of Christ, dismantles Christ-as-death-symbol, and reimagines Christ as “one living door,” “vital-ligature . . . re-tying . . . justice to the world,” and entering “Planet Earth another tilting boat” (15).
In the titular section, “Consider,” McCaslin draws on familiar scriptures passages as epigraphs, “Consider the ravens” (Luke 12:24) and “Consider the lilies of the field” (Matthew 6:28).
The poems in this section are like snap shots of a moment of awe. The reader is invited into suspended time, to pause, reflect, and consider. Here’s an example of one of my favorite poems in the collection:
Consider Who’s There
when we are hunched
near a bonfire
burning
old receipts
ashes
to ashes
suddenly
from cedars
hoo hoo hoo hoo
hoo hoo who ooooooo
night calls
to night
barred owl
in cowl
endarkens us
awake
In this poem, the desire to rid ourselves of both the past (in the burning of the “old receipts”) and the fear of the future (as seen in the lines “ashes to ashes”) gives way to an invitation to be fully awake in the present.
In “Consider” we are hospitably asked to contemplate not just the owl, but the bleeding hearts, the millipede, the sandhill crane, the coast mole, the bearded lichen and so much more.
Two final sections are worth noting. In “Cracking the Jesus Koans” McCaslin begins each poem with a brief passage of scripture, then like good improvisational jazz or she riffs on the passage, subverting or expanding on it. The result is often unexpected. Line by line, the poem meanders away from the reader’s expectations or from predictable, preacherly interpretations. Here’s an example:
Unless a grain die. . .
(The Gospel of John 12:24)
letting go unclasping
ungripping for dear limited life
it shrivels alone shivers
vanishes
but settling into soil
transforming during dream time
makes golden wheat
enough to feed the world
I have read and reread McCaslin’s poems over the years and I love that she writes ekphrastic poems. After reading her book, Heart Work, I went to see Betty Spackman’s art exhibition (one of the panels is on the cover of McCaslin’s book). In the case of the final section of Consider she weaves lines from Robin Blaser’s Libretto from The Last Supper. In these poems, fragments of his lines along with hers, create a reimagined whole. The italicized lines are Blaser’s.
God is the being we are not
the us and not us
before which we bow
not in submission but
openness
where eyes listen
through the three zeroes of the year 2000
to what flows through you me
in
all
the
all
of
all
the fragrance of the violets
against the brutality and terror
of our century
In Consider, McCaslin draws the reader to lay aside expectations and to enter the (often) poet’s mystical reinterpretations. The gift of this book of poems is that we are temporarily given new sight and in-sight into moments of grace, awe, and play.
Susan McCaslin’s Consider may be ordered at goldenEagleBooks@shaw.ca for $20.00 plus postage. Check out her website @ www.susanmccaslin.ca
Consider was published by Aeolus House, 2023.
Jessica Walters has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Mockingbird, Foreshadow, Ormsby Review, Still, Scintilla, Solum, and her short story “Glass Jars” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. Jessica is also the Fiction Editor for Radix Magazine.