Lou Ella Hickman – Writing the Stars [Review]

Eyes on the Earth & the Stars

A Review of

Writing the Stars: Poems
Lou Ella Hickman

Paperback: Press 53, 2024
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Reviewed by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

Sr. Lou Ella Hickman’s fine new book of poems Writing the Stars reminds the reader that the space we occupy, here between heaven and earth, is holy, as are all the beings—human and otherwise—that we share it with. Sr. Lou Ella’s poetic vision is binocular in that even as she ponders the stars and the grand cosmos we are but specks in, she simultaneously fixes her gaze on people, the lowly denizens of earth. That gaze is one of empathy, compassion, and, ultimately, love, offering the reader a poetry of witness as the poet explores the joys experienced and the sorrows withstood by our fellow human beings. 

Reading and savoring the forty-six poems in this collection put me in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s advice offered to a fellow writer, “If you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world even as you struggle to endure it.” The poet, in her perusal of the things of earth, looks into the darkness, but she is undaunted by it. Interspersed among poems that acknowledge tragedy and suffering– on both the grand and the small scale– are poems of celebration and desolation, redeemed by consolation. The world is, indeed, a harsh place, but it is also a beautiful place, worthy of being cherished. At the heart of the poet’s vision is the incarnation, the unwavering belief that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” This should not come as a surprise to the reader, given the dedication of the book “In honor of the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the Order of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament,” the order Sr. Lou Ella belongs to. This scripture passage and this central event of the Christian drama is the unspoken foundation of this Christ-haunted book by this Christ-centered poet.

This is not to say that Writing the Stars is what one might call a “churchy” book. Not by a long shot. From the opening poem, “The Truth of It,” a seeming pagan fable invoking Mother Earth, to the last poem, in which the poet’s wily muse compares herself to moonshine, the poet casts her eye on the things of this world. In between are poems that address tragic historical events (the Shoah, Fukishima), the beauty and power of nature (“Come Rain,” “The Trees”), people who have been abused, forgotten, and otherwise marginalized– many of whom are women– including the displaced and the homeless, immigrants, an unnamed blind premature infant, “the retired lady at the Texas assisted living facility,” and most movingly, the mother of a child murdered in a school shooting as she keeps eternal vigil outside a congressman’s office in a poem titled “vigil”,

your child’s body stretches out on your lap   a pieta

as you remove the thorned crown of thoughts and prayers

           blood slowly crawls down the leg of your chair

then drop by drop marks your vigil on the floor

visitors pass      your silence answers their questions

the outside darkness fills the window pane

the senator’s secretary says 

i have to lock up now

you reply

i’ll be back tomorrow

In this remarkably understated poem, the poet bears witness to the mother’s suffering, seeing in her the same devotion depicted by painted and sculpted pietas for hundreds of years, a modern-day Mary grieving over her crucified child.

Sr. Lou Ella’s vision is sacramental in that she sees the imminence of the divine in ordinary objects and events as well as in ordinary human beings. In the words of Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems and spirit Sr. Lou Ella’s channels, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Since everything is pregnant with meaning, nothing is too insignificant to attract the poet’s probing eye. In “among the ashes” the poet spies a tiny red suitcase spared by the flames in a house fire, an object that takes on poignant symbolic power by the end of the poem as the speaker surveys the remains of the smoldering house, bringing us, at last, to the body of the child who owned it.

In “Texas Snow,” the speaker drives past cotton fields in high summer, spared from the oppressive heat in her “air-cooled” car, when she is suddenly transported to another time and place,

distance distant

time called past

when black hands/brown arms pulled these white blooms

dragged cotton sacks

under a texas july sun

my silence is such a painful distance

what do i know

and

what i cannot know

of dark breathings’ sweat and tears

In this visionary moment the poet escapes the bonds of time, and is painfully reminded of the ways in which she is complicit in the suffering of her fellow human beings, including those who lived long before she was born, and mourns the distance that separates her from those she longs to live in communion with. 

That word, “communion,” and the desire for it, accurately names what this poet holds most dear. Even as these poems acknowledge our brokenness and our isolation, they also serve to mend the world and create unity. In the wonderfully celebratory, “all saints church of the kitchen table,” the poet offers a healing vision of a bountiful feast that enacts the sacrament of Eucharist, 

during this forever moment

we give thanks

over coffee, cream and sugar

all things cereal, orange juice

litany of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast bless us

for the altar is spread with mercy each morning words fleshed sacred to the touch

speaking in tongues of laughter filling saucer and cup 

This poem, with its exuberant litany of good things to eat and drink, with its listing of “the citizens and somewhat saints” who gather at the table, redeems the inevitable griefs and losses that mark our human passage. Sr. Lou Ella gains access to this generous vision by the grace of her faith, but it is poetry that gives her the ability to tell these stories, to embrace the mystery she perceives, and to speak her faith:

i put pen to paper

not knowing

where the lines will end

i, too, do not know where i am going

until i get there

but the poem is everything

road, map, compass

the very engine driving

Poetry is both the written record of that faith and the journey by which she arrives there. We are blessed, as readers, to accompany her along the way.