[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1625641672″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51k7KgUJsTL._SL160_.jpg” width=”105″]Page 2: Paul Willis – Say this Prayer
It’s not too difficult to chart those currents, either, if you’re able to rise above each particular poem and view the broader landscape. The book comes organized into four parts, and the poems in each tend to cohere around a certain subject or an element of the poet’s life. The first part, “Cousin Quartet,” chronicles characters and emotions from Willis’s family life, from his great-grandmother through his own childhood and to his children; the second part, “Under Story,” shares images and moments from his life as an outdoorsman; “Green Studies” relates encounters from his professional life as a poet and teacher. In the final collection, “Antediluvian Baseball,” the focus seems loosened a bit, but the theme seems to be poetry itself, its creators and creations and the process of making poetry.
The kind of poetry Willis himself makes tends to privilege images over ideas. He invites his readers to see a certain place or meet a certain person; he draws you into a certain moment in that place or with that person. He doesn’t often say what he wants you to think about his subjects—or even what he himself thinks—except in a few key moments
Willis ends the first part, for instance, with a line that seems to characterize his attitude towards everything he has just portrayed in the collection. The final poem, “Pausing Out Front,” describes a moment outside a house where Willis’s family lived for a time after a fire destroyed their home. It concludes, “Today as I shift / my feet on the curb, peering through the open door, / I say this prayer into the past, I nod my thanks.” One imagines “this prayer” to be not just the poem, but the whole collection, an expression of the poet’s gratitude for the family described therein who gave him life and share in it with him.
Another revelatory moment comes in the poem “Understory.” Willis recalls an encounter with dogwood blossoms “mount[ing] into the sunshine” that seem to be endowed with some kind of creative or redemptive force:
[As] If understory, the story underall things else, stair-stepping
into sky like angels on a green-leafed ladder.
There, there, and even there—
as friend with friend, taking us upward,
in heaven as it is on earth.
These lines hint at a particular vision behind the entire second section (which takes its title from this poem), where most of the poems recall scenes of natural beauty. Willis seems to be telling the reader that all these images aren’t merely image, but images of something—of something that has the power to transform the viewer (or reader).
This meditative tone isn’t a constant through the third part, where Willis applies a more sardonic vision to some of the characters and tropes of the academic world, but it returns in the fourth section. This section, and the entire book, close with “On the 225th Year of Mission Santa Barbara,” whose final line celebrates the hope that mission has given to “this beautiful, suffering world.”
That line is a fitting end, and a fitting summary, I think, of what Willis is trying to show with his poems—a world where gratitude, wonder, and even pain all have their place. Paul Willis is a worthy guide in that world if you take the time to follow his voice carefully through all its twists and turns.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 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! |
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