The Generosity (Paraclete Poetry)

I have been reading Luci Shaw's poetry for years and years. For this review, I would like to quote from her Introduction. Luci Shaw writes, "If generosity is the keynote of these poems, gratitude is the melody their making has brought my way" (page 11). Time to reread and say thank you.

The young look forward to see where they’re going: the old look backward to understand.That thought keep rising in my mind as I read “The Generosity: Poems,” the latest collection published by Luci Shaw. If you’ve read any or her previous collections, like “Harvesting Fog,” “Scape,” and “What the Light Was Like,” you know she always has an eye on the eternal – in nature, in life, and in people. Even when that sense of the eternal isn’t obvious, it’s always there.The same is true for “The Generosity,” with its 92 poems on subjects as diverse as dandelions and dementia. She finds the eternal wherever she looks; perhaps it’s in the DNA of all living things and the molecular structure of non-thing things. Wherever it is, Shaw finds it.In this collection, she also finds something else, something that’s related to the eternal. That something is family. A number of the poems consider her own life, growing up, and her family. On this poem, for example, one of many of my favorites in the collection, she blends her current life with her childhood and parents.Family of OriginOur parents keep circulatingin the rooms of our lives.Mine are long gone, but if it wouldsatisfy them I would take my heartout of its cage and gift-wrap itfor their anniversary.I glimpse them often, Dad readinga book over my shoulder,now and again offering wordsof advice that might have madesense fifty years ago. The wordsform clots in my memory, cellsbright as blood, a private languageunlike any other.My mother demanded mountainsof me. I managed to supply foothills.They were lovely foothills, butfailure would hang in the air. We stillseem to meet in the heart of an oddargument, words hanging unresolved,glittering sparks in the dark air.Sometimes, when I feel most wrongabout how to remember them, I ammost right, seeing them as they settledinto the grooves of my own memory.I am my own narrative arc,yet I arrange the candles andflowers on my mantelpiece the waymy mother would have done it.And for my father I still writesmall poems, like the ones hecarried in his briefcase toshow his friends whenI was very young.We carry more than our parents’ DNA; what Shaw is saying here is, even after they’re long gone, we still experience the influence of our parents, we still remember their criticism, and we still treasure their love and support. And it continues with our own children. In the passing on of ways of speaking and doing, the family jokes and upsets, the love and support as well as the mistakes, the family represents something eternal.The poems are not all about family. Shaw turns her eye to nature, writing about rainfall, trees, birds, the sounds made by cows; to travel to places like Orcas Island, Willapa, Washington, the Cascades, and a lake in Colorado; and much more.Shaw has published numerous poetry collections and several non-fiction books and edited three poetry anthologies. She’s co-authored three books with Madeleine L’Engle and her essays have been widely anthologized. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, she has been writer on residence at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, since 1988. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.With “The Generosity,” you want to sit outside in the early morning and read these poems aloud. You want to sit next to your father as he uses an eyedropper to feed baby birds whose nest fell out of the big cypress tree in the front yard. You want to stand patiently next to your mother as she finishes missing the pie filling and hands you the spoon to lick. You’d like to forget the time your father stopped speaking to you, for no reason that was ever explained. That’s what Luci Shaw’s poems do.

These poems circle back to the single question: how do I locate the divine in my everyday life? Simply put, Luci Shaw shows us how the divine connects to her life, especially those things most of us relate to: a Chicago winter in 1960 or a magazine or birds. Her task is to name holiness, and she does so in language that eschews patronizing and condescending phrases. She names holiness by means of contrast, metaphorical language, diction and wordplay. Her poems fill my cup and make me want to sing.

I first learned about Luci Shaw from my minister in the pulpit. I had never heard of her despite being a poet myself. I loved "The Generosity" because of its seemingly simple poems on nature and about life. She really knows how to make the ordinary extraordinary and make it look simple, which I know it's not. I will order more of Luci Shaw's books.