A Long Obedience to the Path of Poetry
A Review of
Reversing Entropy: Poems
Luci Shaw
Paperback: Paraclete Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Brad Davis
1. In 1971, the year I became a believer, Luci Shaw’s first book of poems, Listen to the Green, was almost ready for publication. Sometime before I graduated from Gordon College in 1976, her collection was recommended to me by someone who knew that I too was serious about making poems.
What that well-meaning person could not have known was that, in the late 1960s, after pop culture had adopted Rod McKuen as its poet laureate, I had picked up his collection, Listen to the Warm, and promptly discarded it as a style I was determined to avoid. So, it was with his poetry still stuck in my ears that I first laid eyes on Shaw’s Listen to the Green.
My poetry heroes at the time were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandberg, e e cummings, and Denise Levertov. Who was this evangelical poet, Luci Shaw? Was she of their poetical ilk? Or of McKuen’s? Through the 70s and 80s, I was looking for a poetry by believers that took off from the likes of my heroes and explored forcefully, in a contemporary idiom, the integration of faith, life, and language.
It was not until the early 90s that I found what I’d been looking for in John Berryman’s poetic sequence, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” As I stood there in Book Den East, a used bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, and first experienced those eleven poems at the back of Berryman’s Love & Fame, I felt (thank you, Emily Dickinson) “physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” And just like that, Berryman’s sequence became my plumb line for contemporary poetry of faith.
2. I am no physicist. Mathematically, entropy is beyond me. What little I think I understand of it has been mediated by generous simplifiers. Thankfully, on page eight in the front matter of her book, Luci Shaw provides such simplification: “Entropy: A measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness of a system, its lack of order or predictability, resulting in a gradual decline into disorder.” And this is what Shaw sets out to reverse by writing her poems, little made things which “are moving from a state of disorder…into an orderly form designed by the writer.”
Again, I’m no physicist, but as I understand it, there is no reversing entropy; the process is inexorable. But there is a hope shared by believers that all things will be made new and that, in the meantime, our vocation, regardless of the work of our hands, is to point beyond the inexorable to the certainty of what is not apparent (Heb. 11: 1), that in the resurrected body of Jesus we see and hear the big bang of a new creation and catch a glimpse of the future of and for all things. Whereas entropy has a terminus, resurrection is eternal. Poems become more or less well-ordered signifiers of the eternal and of the “when” of when all things will be made new—what St. Paul calls “the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6) and Jesus alludes to as the palingenesis (Mt. 19:28). So making things like poems doesn’t actually reverse what is inexorable, but they are, individually and collectively, carefully ordered stays against the “gradual decline into disorder.”
The seventy-two poems in Luci Shaw’s Reversing Entropy are ordered in six sections, titled to guide the reader along the way to her final piece, “The Quickening: To be Sung in Procession to Heaven’s Gate,” a prose poem (or is it a flash essay?) that culminates with her description of the “when” of when all things will be made new. Along the way to this piece, she gives close attention to the things of this world—house finches, dogwoods, lichens, mountains, car ferries, gingko leaves, Vermeer’s Woman in Blue, snow, X-rays and old knees—ordering them into poems that delight in the music of plain speech, art pieces that are completed in and through each reader’s experience of them.
In my experience of the poems in Reversing Entropy, two things stand out: (1) Shaw follows her own dictum found on her website: “Whether we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we must start where we are and use what we have;” and (2) she aims to encourage not only believers in their world-and-word attending life of faith but also poets in their desire to make poems. Virtually the whole of section two in Reversing Entropy bears this burden of encouraging poets. Here, from that section’s first poem to its last, she breaks down how poems happen for her:
- On any “long day, generously blue,” she needs “to be there, like a news reporter, with a new, / clean page in my notebook, open like a glass jar, / to gather from underfoot the evening’s / hot, crunchy language.” (from “Cicada Night”)
- “From the sun-ghosted roadside grass / voices of light speak. // Listen.”
(from “Fresh”) - “I want the words, all / lined up, to feel like children waiting / to run outside to recess.”
(from “Waiting for Words”) - “When the words begin to arrive…, / they arrive visible, like dandelion seeds.” Then, one by one, “a fresh phrase” happens, and eventually “the phrases [are] thinking back at me…, / demanding to be / written down.” (from “How It Happens”)
- “Out shopping in the supermarket / you overhear… / a phrase that stumbles… / into your ear…. // You can’t help but / pencil the words / on the back of a crumpled envelope.” “Later,… / your friend… / will undoubtedly suggest / revisions that sound, / in your grateful ear, / just right.”
(from “Sudden”) - “You open your journal to a fresh, clean page,…. / You wait, then, for the / best nouns and verbs to show up.” (from “New Poem”)
- “You modify it / as you go…. / You re-read / the rough draft…, / reading the words aloud,… / needing / to hear them aloud, hoping for them to come together / cleanly.”
(from “So Much Depends”) - “I am one who waits, / still, to arrive // where language breeds, unhindered.” (from “December”)
Luci Shaw is now into her eighth decade of listening, waiting, wanting, taking notes, and revising rough drafts into poems that satisfy her. In this, she is an exemplar of the craft of poem making, hers having been (in the words of F. Nietzsche) “a long obedience in the same direction.” Reversing Entropy is Shaw’s eighteenth book of poems (!), and still, she is “listening to the green”—
I sit by the tent, knitting a jacket.
Below the bank, the Nooksack’s green
rush of water never goes quiet,
blankets all other sounds.
(from “Knitting in the Wild” in Reversing Entropy)
I will leave it to readers of this review to discover whether her poems sing to them (yes, buy the book), but as for me, my short list for “best in show” from Reversing Entropy include “Exuberance, Mt. Baker National Forest,” “The Apricot Tree,” “In a Field,” “Energy & Entropy,” and, in the collection’s final section, the two deeply affecting elegies, “Remembering Rosalind” and the untitled, seven-poem sequence “in memory of my brother,….” But the one line that I have copied into my journal, for how it not only crowns her collection but summarizes the eschatological hope upon which I live each new day, is the last line from the book’s penultimate piece, “Clues for Perception”:
“Shadows will be consumed by the wide mouth of light.”
Brad Davis
Brad Davis is a poet (MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts) and retired Episcopal priest (MDiv, Trinity School for Ministry). He is the author of On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems and Trespassing on the Mount of Olives: Poems in Conversation with the Gospels (Poiema Poetry Series). For more, visit braddavispoet.com
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