Susan McCaslin’s new book of poetry, Named and Nameless, is a good conversation partner for the modern contemplative. In its three sections, we are walked through spirals of thought/prayer/practice, occurring within recognizable contemporary accoutrements. McCaslin’s work teaches as it sings; we are shown how we might pray, how we might find something mystical right next to us.
The opening epigraphs from the Hymn to Inanna, Lao-Tzu, and Leonard Cohen form the key signature for the book; themes and melodies from each of these three streams of thought and music are apparent in McCaslin’s own voice throughout all the poems. She meditates with ideas of and questions about the divine feminine and where we might glimpse her footprints. She is informed by a kind of Taoist playfulness that takes the lives of non-humans in our ecosystems seriously. If this book had a playlist, Leonard Cohen’s music would certainly belong, lending a mood of rueful cultural critique while still singing.
All three of these streams can be seen in ‘The Anxious Contemplative,’ one of the book’s anchor poems. The contemplative is drawn in the feminine, which signals divinity: “When she rises…she sees through dawn…limps to her cavern.” There is a humble daily fact: on one level, the poem is simply recounting the dream of slipping and falling, and you can almost feel the body jerk awake to face the day. But then we get an element of unexpected image and play; “two deer stepping quietly… hooves dance grace,” and we aren’t sure if the deer are a dream or a symbol or materially visible out the window, or all three. This poem makes a point, or rather shows a method which is echoed and varied throughout the collection. Contemplation is a project that traces mystery in and through daily text and sensory experience. The feminine subject may be divine. The world may surprise us, blurring lines between dream and waking. There is a melancholy contained in the dream of falling (“breathing raggedly,”) and yet the poem ends with the “branching trees of life.”
The best poems give us tastes of real moments of prayer that we can share. “Who is She,” “Sturgeon Visitations,” “Imprint me in a Heron’s Dream,” are all examples of poems whose mystical assessments are undeniably anchored to the tangible world. In “A Vision of Trees,” we get a literal playfulness, “eye to bough” that rises to a mystic communion, “fold/ into other creatures’ eyes/ green canopies.” A literal moment becomes an expanded moment, and this grammar recurs throughout the book. It teaches the reader how to pray: look with your eyes, and then discover that your eyes are more than what you see.
At times, the poems feel like a remnant of a contemplation of which we, the reader, may not be invited to enter. ‘Much of the time I Lie Wrapped in a Cloud of Unknowing,’ for example, continues the thematic entanglement between “sensing process/ as serious play,” but the reader is kept at a distance. McCaslin is tracing the footprints of her own thought or internal movement – “conjugating thoughts….I worked through in my twenties,” but the poem does not show us what thoughts, other than “tangled waltz of time timelessness.” The poem can show the reader how we might retrace our own thoughts and movements, but it does not admit us in.
In the poem ‘The Names,’ which ends the first section of the book, she works from an excerpt of Neruda’s ‘Gautama Christ’ to meditate on the “sacred but exhausted/ Names.” It is here that I feel the unspoken project of engaging and retrieving sacred names we, as a dominant culture, may have lost or broken. So that when, in the third section, she has poems for Gaia or the Holy Spirit, or Inanna, I read them in light of this frame; what sacred names are “exhausted,” or “wounded,” have come out of “oceans of love and fear” that we might now “listen to their layered soundings where/ something still remains”?
All of these feminine Names, these figures, are gestured to in a variety of poems, and yet they remain an abstraction by the end, albeit ones we begin to sense may be more present than we know. McCaslin has kindled an appetite for something, perhaps setting the stage for encounters beyond the pages of the book. It can make a good companion for those, like myself, wishing to know the sentience of trees, the forgotten names of Sophia, the possible renewal of the divine life in the world, even amidst the sometimes ugly clutter of the present. This book is a rich and spacious guide to spiritual practice. I will take it with me to pray with her poems to feel that “some primal wet/ greenness remains/ where we are being/ absorbed into/ everything.”
Named and Nameless by Susan McCaslin was published by Inanna Publications and Education Inc., in 2025.
Rita Powell holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and currently serves as the Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard. Her work in poetry and performance art explores deep knowledge of body and land in the tradition of Christian ritual and philosophy.