Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap

It is entirely appropriate that I post this review on Ash Wednesday--a day most idiosyncratic, a day of ritual and bodily transformation (however brief). The acceptance of ash on the forehead--Catholics walking, working, thinking, living with that mark--must seem to non-Catholics a particularly archaic and confusing action. Lent is certainly of concern and practice to a wide variety of Christians, but I've always associated the season with the Catholic church, perhaps even a directly Jesuit or ascetic focus on the corporeal.

It's a beautiful tradition--5:30 mass at St. Joseph's in Newton was beyond packed, and there's a silence that follows the distribution of ashes, a wave of people moving in March quiet, resigned and reserved in the power of community. And, appropriate to my tastes in religion, it's Ash Wednesday's apparent oddity to others that makes it most appealing to me--and it's in that vein that I so enjoyed Sarah Vap's collection, Faulkner's Rosary.

This is a book about pregnancy, about the nearly incomprehensible beauty of the creation of life, and yet it is also a powerful argument for craft at the line level in poetry--an almost forgotten art of care with words. The book is individual without being obtuse, particular without being provincial--I'm reminded of my interest in Mary Biddinger's Saint Monica poems. Vap's central metaphors bubble and burn, and the image and concept of the rosary is unpacked as to renew the concept (and the rosary is such a rich concept, is it not? the tactile motion, bead to bead, moment to moment, prayers lifted beyond whispers).

"Children" contains the title of the book, but it's a poem about body and birth--certainly about children. The earliest poems in this collection establish Vap's schema of form--child/mother connection--color--sky and more. "Children" works within this schema, but extends it acoustically:

Link to link:
counting prayers to recall what their bodies should be.

We hear "chanting," and a "small hum", and the narrative of the book reflects back to the previous poem, "Eggtooth." I love the sounds there, the connection between childhood understanding of the rosary and later pregnancy:

My grandmother

making the braided bread. Singing
the leaping song of the gazelle in the marriage vow:

I wanted you, baby, braided

There's this sense of connectedness in the book--the narrator's mother's pregnancy is mentioned, as is a prefiguring of the future father of this child. The pastoral and temporal mold to create another world, a particularly surreal and yet tangible place, where the world of this book is wholly unique--I've never quite seen a poet be able to sustain such a narrative throughout an entire collection. Even the titles of the poems are so individual:

"A cradle of warmed oats for the chickens on the Epiphany"
"A bear as big as an angus in my parents' backyard"
"Fink, Punk, Nincompoop, Honky-Tonk, Sunlight, Sunnysideup..."

*

"Spill" is a poem with a prosaic title, but it's such a wonderful Marian piece. In the center of the poem we find these lines:

When I think of children I think of us gathered

at the cement statue of Mary,
up in the tree in May. We'd dress her in white,

we'd crown her with flowers, and carry her
inside to chant mystery to mystery

along the church walls.

This Marian representation is bookended by a lake made malleable by weather. It's a poem suffused by mystery--and I think that's the essential word to describe this collection as a whole. It's a world, and a poet, quite aware of (and comfortable within) the mysterious. And what is more mysterious than pregnancy? And how wonderful that something so mysterious is so common (how many expectant mothers, now? nearly all of us knows at least one--a person so necessary to a new life, so ready and wondering). I love the irony--and I love that the narrator of Vap's book is so often awaiting the arrival of the child. Here, from "Inlaid":

The dying he is about to do--being born
out of me--I feel him fasten, and refuse it.

There is almost everything

in the world in him--he is ready.

Is this anticipation not faith? In this poem, it is:

It will
detonate our Lent--the waiting season

that will unhook us from each other.

And, later:

If I could name when

if we could name
exactly who, this baby, his pieces all together, his bits

strung together, he'd maneuver--
genuflect--

and appear, wouldn't he, something else

and unraveled of me.

Rosary--litany--becomes body. Possibility--through faith--becomes life. And the child of this narrator, this world, arrives with more than a healthy amount of hope. The book is so threaded with a Catholic aesthetic, and yet this aesthetic is deeper than dogma. It's a beautiful book.