The Word That Is a Silence Before It Is a Word
A Review of
The Locust Years: Poems
Paul J. Pastor
Wiseblood Books, 2025
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by Erin Beasley
“While it may seem that the riddle of this book is about grief or loss or lack, or any number of things, it may be worth asking: what is the word that may not be said in the riddle of this book?” writes Paul J. Pastor in his letter to the reader. I confess I quailed upon reading those words. I spectacularly fail at solving riddles. My husband regularly has to explain the punchlines of jokes to me. What if I can’t figure out the word that may not be said in the riddle of this book?
This question of the word that may not be said haunted my readings of The Locust Years. It set me on a reading trajectory I found distressing. I like to think I’m an attentive reader, but I was no longer reading the poems to gain a sense of the book or to experience the poems as poems. I was reading as a detective, a sleuth. Is this the answer to the riddle? I asked, again and again. Again and again, no. What about this one? No, again.
The seasonal structure of the book is another riddle. The seasons—if they are seasons—are plural, not singular. The poems are set within The Springs, The Summers, The Falls, and The Winters. The addition of a single letter, the commonplace “s,” disorients and bewilders even as it surrounds the reader and offers assurance: you are not lost in these plural seasons (if they are seasons) but found.
The pluralization also suggests the ongoing nature of the seasons. Seasons are not distinct; rather, seasons overlay and intermingle. A person can inhabit spring and winter, if not all the seasons, simultaneously and interchangeably. And what happens in one season can easily happen in another, as with so many of the poems in this collection. Loss and grief and regret span the seasons, as do surprise and wonder and joy at the sheer beauty of life, life itself.
This intuition of the seasons—again, if they are seasons—comes indirectly, through the subtle cue of an “s.” Is that not a riddle, the way a single letter can reset one’s senses and orientation in the world? And how is it that one can understand this subtle cue even without a straightforward reason, explanation, or proposition?
Perhaps I’m being too esoteric or philosophical – yet the second poem of the collection ends, “Understanding nothing, but knowing what it means” (6). This concept permeates the book. The speakers of the poems know, somewhere deep inside themselves, what a thing means, even if they cannot call it into a precise shape. In “The Mole,” the speaker asks:
Now, underneath my life,
What burrows through the years?
My thoughts shake like tall grass –
Whose blunt claw digs my heart (10)?
The speaker sees the evidence of a thing at work – “The soil trembles, heaves” (10) – yet he cannot pinpoint the thing itself. It remains a mystery.
This is not cause for vexation. Quite the opposite. In “Blue Bandana,” in “The Falls” section of the collection, the speaker begins, “I thought I knew what prayer was / in the young, good days that smelled of mint and dill” (56). (As an aside, the collection overflows with delightful allusions, as with this one of mint and dill. It can be no accident that Jesus tells the Pharisees to not lose sight of primary matters in the tithing of mint and dill.) But something happens:
Then there was a shaking in the underground
and through the crack that rived the bedrock stone
shone the pink glow, luminous, alone,
freed by the shaking in the underground (56).
The speaker transforms. “I became persuaded to a joy / whose knowledge was the knowledge of deep dark / turned sideways by the presence of one spark” (56). Again, the cause behind this persuasion remains oblique. The “deep dark” and the “one spark” give no biographical particulars. Yet particulars aren’t necessary. Anyone who has suffered knows the joy that comes from darkness, yet yields to a pinprick of light.
This darkness and revelatory light, along with silence and mystery, remain with the reader. Poetry’s power lies in both what it says and what it refuses to say, what it portrays versus what it ignores, what it gives to black ink and what it remits to the white page. Poetry pushes and pulls; it frames—and often reframes, repeatedly—a question through lack and abundance.
One of the poems in the collection invites readers to “sit and know the quieting night” (39). The more the speakers in these poems learn to be still, to wait for the snail to speak (11), the more they seem to be able to withstand loss and grief and lack – all the words mentioned in the letter to the reader. Consider the speaker in “Surely, a Well Feels like a Wound to the Earth?” The speaker addresses a child, which most likely recalls the child from the opening to “The Springs” section:
The time is dark.
The time is wild.
So fill the lamp.
So guide the child.
In the second and final stanza of “Surely, a Well…”, the speaker says to the child:
The silence trembles in its finite egg.
What shall you do with it, and when?
Wait a little. Not everyone who will learn
to love you has yet been born (88).
This admonition calls up patience, silence, pain, fragility, love, and hope. In one poem a father says, “I still stand at the gateway of your heart. / I will die standing; I cannot depart” (57). In another, “What we hold dear is laid on us. / Then we are laid on it” (43). The poem “Advice” warns the reader to forsake Beauty if they can. But if not, if
her spear is in your spleen
and you can’t shake her off,
then give your life for love of her
and count that good enough (85).
And the final poem, “The Sower,” concludes:
For hope and folly’s boundary lines are thin.
Idiots and believers share a bed
Too short for stretching on; and how
I still can do this, I don’t know, but I –
But do I do, and with a love of it,
Packing earth under my broken nails,
And looking for that dear face in the dirt
To send up shoots; to praise the eaten years (100).
I don’t have an answer to what word may not be said in the riddle of this book. All I know is that words and silence, and silences that are words, inhabit the pages of this collection. This is a book about life in all its snarled complexity. Despair and joy are bedfellows, as are love and rugged tenacity in spite of, if not because of, sorrow and pain. It speaks to rising, again and again, as “the realm of love renews / the battle it was born to lose.”
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
