Heart of Ice, Heart of Fire

Poetry chapbooks by Susannah Lee and Jane Morton express their spirit in the imagery of North and South

A spirit animates poetry. Often, this spirit animates faith in something greater, something divine. Two chapbooks find spirit in disparate places on our earth—the Arctic and the Bible Belt.

Wintering Over by Susannah Lee is a beautiful collection of poems inspired by a fascinating subject: the story of 12 Discalced Carmelite sisters and novices who relocated from Iceland to Arctic Norway in the 1990s. The Carmelites are a monastic order, reformed in the 16th century by St. Teresa of Ávila to be faithful to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Lee’s own contemplative life moved her to reflect on the lives of women devoted to prayer in a forbidding climate. The poet says she felt the urge to “time-travel” to explore the physical experience of the sisters “in the midst of descending darkness, bitter cold, and solitude warmed by devotion and community.” Not only did Lee travel in time, she also traveled in persona, writing the poems about the convent in the voice of one of the nuns.

Physicality as a portal to spirituality is a Carmelite tradition. Teresa of Ávila’s own poetry and prose continually expressed a bodily experience of ardor for God; the saint’s most famous vision—described in both her autobiography, The Life, and in her poetry—is a corporeal and erotic moment in which an angel with a golden spear pierced her heart and, upon withdrawing the spear, evoked a delightful pain in the enraptured Teresa. Lee’s work is an heir to this kind of muscular devotion, as this section of the poem “Matins” shows clearly:

These stanzas also reveal another, very appealing aspect of Lee’s writing in Wintering Over—an absorbing sense of place. Lee brings her readers to the dim, frozen Arctic with image after image that captures the experience across all five senses. We feel the climate and we feel the Carmelites struggle as they try to create a convent with the few resources allowed to them by their vow of poverty. Fortunately, the poet doesn’t stop at the rugged austerity of the Carmelites’ Norwegian home, but examines in imagistic detail the magnificence of the landscape, which “opens in air to a blue pulse of sea surrounding us.” Lee’s sense of place also includes the sense of human labor required to survive in the Arctic. In the poem, “Fjord,” for example, the sister who speaks the poem describes the work of a girl who lives near the convent, “dimpling flaxen quilts with waxed thread and quick elbow knots.” These elements of place in Lee’s poems create a whole greater than the sum of its parts—a conviction that the Arctic is the threshold to the realm of spirit and religious faith. A journey by boat in a cold tempest puts “afterlife my arms”; the vast dark night summons “litanies of ice and smoke welling within us.”

Although the Norway convent galvanized the poet’s work, it did not limit it. A second section of the chapbook contains poetry drawn from Lee’s own life experience, written in a voice that harmonizes with the voice of the Carmelite nun in the first section. Lee speaks of intimate sensory encounters with nature and the seasons, most notably winter, that morph into wonder, grief, and spiritual acceptance, as in this excerpt from the gorgeous four-part poem,  “February, March (near Old Deerfield, Massachusetts)”:

Across the two sections—nun’s voice and Lee’s voice—are techniques of craft that allow all the poems to fit together in natural and seamless manner. One of these techniques is Lee’s command of the couplet, which is the stanza form for fourteen of the twenty poems in the chapbook. In Lee’s skillful hands, the couplet is a device for setting a strong pace while creating a good deal of white space on the page; it is the formal expression of the central themes of human strength and the open expanse of a cold climate in the life the both Lee and the Carmelites.

Another craft technique resides in the diction Lee employs, Anglo-Saxon mono- and disyllables interrupted at critical junctures by a twenty-dollar Latinate world, as in this example “An old oarlock/and wind chimes intoning the air. Severance is divine…” The effect of Lee’s diction is a spiritual one—the very spirituality of Teresa and of Lee’s imagery, in which the physical is the door to the sacred. The short pithy words of our language ground Lee’s poems in the heft and thump and scratch of bodies in the world; the Latinate words, our high Norman inheritance, open up ecclesiastical moments in out sensory and material lives . Wintering Over is a book about the search for the spiritual within the corporeal. Lee takes us on this quest not only in her images, but in the very bones of her agile language.

* * *

Bones of a different character litter the hot American climate of Snake Lore by Jane Morton. Morton’s personae “eat the fat and chew the bones/for when we’ve got none.” The poet is “[h]ollow-boned and clumsy, asking anyone to pick me up.”  Bone is a sign of the flesh, its desires, and the mystery of mind and body that permeates our lives. This is expressed in these stanzas from the second of three poems called “Snake Lore” in the book:

Morton, who studied and now teaches in Birmingham, Alabama, places their poems across the American South, in towns like Dayton Texas. Mayflies, droughts, creeks, and sows populate the terrain. So do the Bible Belt’s devil and prayer. And snakes—which become for Morton a trove of images for a robust anti-religious spirituality. In an excerpt from first “Snake Lore” poem, Morton’s writing feels fractal, a serpentine whole built of many snakes—in the poet’s garden, in the Garden of Eden, and in the snake-like lowness of a punishing divinity:

Commentators on Morton’s chapbook have remarked on the poetry’s “transcendence” and tone that is both “visceral and ethereal.” These descriptions hit the mark. No Christian or other creedal God hovers over the pages of Snake Lore. The book does not adore or worship. But spirit lives in this chapbook, nonetheless. The presence of spirit shines forth in the commitment to truth. Morton wants to “say what is good/what is real,/what is not,” even though to do so is very hard. Truth is a quality beyond the human realm; what is true is true even if no human being practices it or knows it. And the way to this truth is, for Morton, analogous to Teresa of Ávila’s entryway to spirit— through the physical.

Morton’s physical imagery—as demonstrated already by the poetry already quoted—impresses itself with force and precision in poem after poem. Images engage us in the throat, the heart, and the gut. For example, the poem “Drought” distills the unusual and completely unique feel of a drought in the American South. The human body senses death—of insects, of animals, of plants, even one’s own desiccating cells. Clay soil turns to cracked stone. There is a skittering anxiety over a dearth of water, the fitful fretfulness of day after day without the soothing sound of rain. Drought, too, is a metaphor for Morton’s bout with an illness that infiltrated their body and heightened their sense of death’s proximity  When the poem ends with the poet’s survival, we know what a miracle it is to live on.

All sixteen poems in Snake Lore are shapely. Morton exercises great control over the choice of each poem’s structure and appearance on the page. The poet’s craft in fitting the shape of the poem to its theme is uncanny. “One Summer He Showed Me Mayflies” darts from side to side on the page like one of these frenzied insects, who hatch, mate, live, and die in just one day. “Overnight” and “Drought” are both in staggered tercets, lending a dirge-like, mournful quality, with an air of foreboding, to these poems. “Aubade” and “Nature,” poems that address the physical and emotional wounds of life, use the disorder of lines and fragments enjambed and scattered all over the page to convey trauma.

As conscious of shape as Morton is, they never forget that poetry is an aural art. Morton’s poems employ multiple sonic techniques with both assurance and pertinence to the themes and images. Several poems make full use of the kind of alliteration present in Anglo-Saxon prosody to support a mood. An  example occurs in the poem “There Are So Many Flies in the Kitchen,” where phrases such as “blinds’ broken invitation” and “slip through, suddenly,” increase the poem’s augury of dread.  In other poems, the sounds of long-vowel verbs that end in “e”—so particular to English—resonate in the line, also serving to slow it down.  The third and final “Snake Lore” is one of these—a poem sonorous with words like “loose,” “bite” “bruise,” “rage,” and even “turpentine.”

The consideration of sonic patterns in Morton’s brilliant book carries us full circle to the poet’s transcendence. Morton writes of the physical, then transcends it in flights of spirit. This upward movement has a cadence, a music, that swells at the core of poem, then softens. Morton’s poems do not resolve with a thud, they end with a tone of acceptance of what is. Morton’s song ends in the sound of truth—as clear or as faint the poet hears it.

—Dana Delibovi

***