Bruce Beasley’s poems are acts of faith in—at least for, I’m guessing, many of his readers—in faithless times.  His poems are difficult and, perhaps because of their difficulty, engaging.

I had fallen behind on reading his works but recently bought his last three collections.  I have finished Theophobia.

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Reading this book, I took notes on what it is like to read Beasley poems.  Here are some of these thoughts, some of them perhaps different phrasings of the same thought:

Beasley’s poems somehow work—or rather they shape a willing reader’s readiness to accept and approve of the moves/leaps they make.  He seems to have an unerring sense of how unrelated thoughts relate.

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Would I read Beasley’s books if I didn’t—whenever I can—write poems.  What patient reader does Beasley have in mind?  Why do I keep reading when I know I am not keeping up?  I enjoy Beasley’s poems but never think I know enough to get them.

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His poems collect verbal knots that often play with/off religious language–religious stories, prayers, hymns, prophecies, vows, marginal glosses, possible oral sayings somehow recovered, parables . . . .  The nots can also contain references and quotations from scientific books and journals. These verbal knots may combine into something like scripture (the way, perhaps, the sentences in Emerson’s essays combine).

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Beasley writes Hopkins-like poems that out-Hopkins Hopkins.  Compound and hyphenated words abound, often newly minted.  The syntax is often taut, fraught.

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Beasley’s poems are often delightful struggles that leave me wondering if the delight is worth the struggle.  I wonder if what I take as struggle should be taken as play.

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In Theophobia two poems stand out for me as poems to return to.

“Valedictions” is, for me, the most accessible poem in the book.  It is a collection, as its subtitle says, a collection of “little missives against your going.”  It focuses on a separation—probably two lovers (though I wonder if I am to think of a God making Himself distant).  The speaker senses that his worth has been lessened:

            —I am to you a currency

            devalued, then defunct

            then collectable among

            cabinets of curiosity, some

            access-forbidden archival vault

He describes the relationship in terms, I take it, of a mathematical ratio:

            You are to me as what is made

            in love is

            to the humdrum means of reproduction.

“Genomic Variations” is a nine-section, ten-page poem that considers how genetics shapes our thinking about the self/soul:

            Can’t we say

            anymore, with Descartes, the soul

            can work independently of the brain,

            can we say anymore, with Descartes,

            ignoramus et ignorabimus, we are ignorant

            and so shall remain

The poem contains a brilliant redoing of St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Creatures”—focused on the OncoMouse.

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Two more Beasley collections remain on the shelf.  I will return to them when I have time and inclination.