A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems
Author: Robert Siegel
Moving up the chain of being from inchworm to angel, Siegel's poems celebrate life in all its aspects, from unsettling glimpses of the abyss to union with nature and that which transcends it---from oracular beasts to ordinary people, from the seismic love of boar and sow to a surgeon's reflections on a neardeath experience and "the last tantrum of a dying star." On the way they explore the mystery of evil, the meaning of history, our own mysterious quests, and the human search for transformative joy. Siegel's poems rejoice in the being of each particular thing, finding epiphanies in the ordinary, inviting us to step outside ourselves into an "ecstasy of particulars."
Product Reviews for A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems
| A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems Christianity and Literature - June 22, 2009 Paul J. Willis Word count: 1418. Citation details below A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems. By Robert Siegel. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006. ISBN 1-55725-430-3. Pp. xii + 179. $26.00. This handsomely printed and bound collection is a fitting testament to the consistent radiance of Robert Siegel's poetry. The new poems in the collection, divided into three sections, constitute about eighty pages: the selected poems, drawn from three previously published volumes, make up a hundred more. All told, a lot of poems--the very richness of a new and selected edition can also be its bane. But if you are willing, like Siegel's "Giant Panda" to "chew the shoots" at a modest pace, and do not try to do anything so greedy as to swallow these poems at a single sitting, you will emerge with "their green light in [your] mouth ... / holding the secret between tongue and palate" (13). This particular panda comes from the first part of the new poems, in which Siegel reprises his lifelong predilection for observing and inhabiting a whole array of earthly creatures--not only the romantic ones, like the "Tiger" whose "mouth flashes a rose" (9) or the wolf whose "music is murder over the hills" (18), but the odd and tiny ones as well, like the "Deer Tick" "among the sequoia of your armhairs" (7) or the "Inchworm" who never feels "quite all together" (14). These descend from the "Snail" in The Waters Under the Earth (2005), who laments, "I sign my path with tears" (127); from the "Muskie" in In a Pig's Eye (1980), "turning the drowsy / silk of his fins" (146); and from the snake in "Snakesong" in The Beasts and the Elders (1973), "thin hose of breath" (170). Siegel brings surprising turns of language to the inner topography of each creature; the result is often sacramental but never sentimental. Sometimes Siegel ventures into the realm of specifically biblical creatures, to fine effect. In "A Colt, the Foal of an Ass" from the selected portion, the beast of burden reflects on "this moment of bearing the man, / a weight that is light and easy" (118). "The Serpent Speaks" which concludes the first part of the new poems, is perhaps the greatest achievement of the collection. This long, sinuous monologue tempts us all over again--"I am another vine"--even as it rehearses the infection of all of history and the inevitable diminishment of the diabolical speaker (28). And yet the serpent is always a serpent, slithering side by side with the other natural snakes in this volume, all exquisitely observed. Perhaps this is the place, amidst these congratulations, to register a slight but significant criticism. It has to do with diction--the occasional use of scientific diction--that falls flat on my ear. When we are told, in a rich Hopkinsian catalogue in "Rinsed with Gold, Endless, Walking the Fields" to turn our attention to "the giddy atom" (158) or to "the sanctum of genes" (159), I must confess my interest flags, because I never saw such outside the pages of a textbook. Atoms and genes are not part of my felt experience of the world, so why try to sandwich them in? In attempting to enlarge the poem, Siegel creates blank spaces, lacunae. Likewise, in "Hunting in Widener Library" when we are told of"millions of cells thinking" (172), I am left with no distinct physical impression. When the speaker is a physician, as in "The Surgeon After Hours" "brain cells" are appropriate diction (91). But in the psalm-like "Aubade," when "the cerebral cortex draws across its synapses" (78), I am drawn out of the poem. Happily, these lapses in diction seldom occur, and I want to hasten to point out other glories of this collection. Prominent among them are the portraits of New Testament characters that comprise the second part of the new poems. These rough sonnets crystallize the inner lives of a whole array of individuals. Take, for example, "Perfection," on Mary Magdalene, whose flask of perfume has been brought from Egypt by a Roman general and given to her with the command, '"Never age.... / Stay perfect. This will help"' (37). Or "Judas" who confides to us, "All along I was the only one who seemed to know / what the Man could do if he put his mind to it" (41). Or "The Epicure" who enjoys ... a pleasant life: at night the temple girls, occasionally, after lunch, the flute-playing boy. A moderate life: poetry for the heart and prose to temper the mind, though I found less and less joy in it.... Then, one day, happening to hear in the agora "one speak of a strange god," suddenly he "heard Pythagoras' // golden spheres turn for a second" (46). It is the turning of these golden spheres that points to Siegel's abilities and aspirations as a poet. His way of seeing is not merely sacramental but ultimately mystical. In "Annunciation," he marks the coming of Gabriel in the most homely and heavenly of ways: Things grew brighter, more distinct, themselves, in a way beyond explaining. This was her home, yet somehow things grew more homelike. Jars on the shelves gleamed sharply: tomatoes, peaches, even the crumbs on the table grew heavy with meaning and a sure repose as if they were forever. (34) Likewise, in "Patmos," Siegel records the vision of John, "now in the blaze of noon and when the stars sang to his eyes" (47). This anagogic impulse is sustained in poems throughout the volume. Part three of the new poems begins with the shaped stanzas of "Peonies": "we see in them absolute / fire at the center, stasis / of star's core ..." (51). They are as "Dante saw the stars in a glass, / a corolla of souls, / each reflecting//the other's light / and charity ..." (51-52). Not surprisingly, another poem in this section is titled "Traherne," a tribute to and imitation of that supremely mystical seventeenth-century English poet. Siegel glosses him when he writes, "The smallest grain of wheat would light the ground ..." (60). The very last poem in the volume, "Voice of Many Waters," with an epigraph from Revelation and a dedication to Clyde Kilby, is reminiscent of Traherne as well. First to last, in poems that span perhaps forty years, Siegel has stayed wondrously true to this vision. Of course, he is also, almost always, down to earth, and I will conclude this review by pointing out a couple of more grounded favorites selected from his most recent collection, The Waters Under the Earth. "Carrying the Father" and "Fireworks" are wonderful evocations of childhood--also of course the special province of poets like Vaughan and Traherne and Wordsworth. "Carrying the Father" which takes its impulse from the Aeneid, is a multi-part elegy that excels in both dignity and intimacy. The poem begins: From here I carry him upon my back. He is no longer heavy, though sometimes I stumble over grief. In fact, he is thin as the wing on an October fly, seen through as if not there at all, but in a certain light suddenly ablaze, a transparent map of all my life. (83) But the poem then moves into particular memories, laden with meaning but dressed in the everyday. His father takes him to Gettysburg, to a lake cabin, to the city pool, or just into the back yard to burn leaves: A small flame leaps: a yellow maple leaf curls like a fist down to its glowing bones. In its brief flare your face is orange, your hatbrim lights from underneath and your red-checked shirt glows and goes out. (88) From these burning leaves it is one small step to "Fireworks," which begins in the boy's world of ... mauve, green, and red rice paper packets of firecrackers covered with mystical Chinese characters, contraband I'd saved for all that winter.... (92) and ends apocalyptically in "the whole earth blooming in the heavens ... / the secret work of gravity and light" (93). There are real finches in this book, and there is also Pentecost. In the poem "Half a Second," as in the entire volume, Robert Siegel records a lifetime of "the hopeless addiction of the tongue / to an ecstasy of particulars" (74). I suggest we join him. |
| Paul J. Willis |
| Westmont College |
| Citation Details Title: A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems Author: Paul J. Willis Publication: Christianity and Literature (Magazine/Journal) Date: June 22, 2009 Publisher: Conference on Christianity and Literature Volume: 58 Issue: 4 Page: 777(4) |
| THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING The Water Under the Earth by Robert Siegel (Canon Press, 2005. 134 pages. $12 pb) A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems by Robert Siegel (Paraclete Press, 2006. 180 pages. $26) Readers who come to Robert Siegel's poetry without recourse to his vita might assume the poet has a background in zoology or possibly zoo keeping. There is scarcely a creature, from the lowly earthworm to the majestic whale that he has not written about with sympathy and respect-and with the uncanny insight of a man who truly knows his animals. In fact Siegel's background, aside from boyhood visits to an uncle's farm and fishing tips with his father, is literary, and his interest in God's creatures stems primarily from his interest in God. Which is not to say that Siegel, who wrote his PhD. thesis 0n Samuel Taylor Coleridge, takes an overtly theological approach to his subject matter. H is poetry has deep roots in the romantic movement and in that literature we might loosely term mythic-literature that addresses the ultimate questions of human existence through fables designed to animate our sense of wonder, reverence, and awe. A novelist as well as a poet (his five fantasy novels include the award-winning Whalesong trilogy), Siegel had not published a book of poems since 1980. These two volumes appearing within several months of each other, thus represent a gathering of poems many years in the making, a gallery of miniatures and vignettes that cover nearly half the poet's life. To say the poems arc finely crafted would do them an injustice. They have been whittled, shaved. sanded, and polished until they glow like fine woodcarvings. There is something sturdy and rock-solid about each one of them, as if the poet mined them from deep in his psyche, at that level where the collective unconscious finds its myths. Siegel's working methods may be inferred from the concluding lines of "How to Catch A Poem" (Pentecost): . . . Avoid sleep, follow all day, At night listen for its cry under the moon. Finally you may gather enough to show its presence. Delay finishing what you have. Take your time. Return home and frame the cast of its footprint: that is the poem. The metaphor of the hunt is common throughout Siegel's poetry, which often uses fishing, farming, stargazing, and other activities involving nature as ways to explore the human relation to the cosmos, The hunt, after all, is also a quest, and the quest for transcendent wisdom is the essence of myth. Siegel's quests have a contemporary slant, since they usually occur in the realm of the familiar, even the mundane: a farmer feeding his pigs, a boy dreaming of fireworks, a blackbird caught in a chimney, a son remembering his father's home movies- such bits of reality may not be the stuff of myth, except in the hands of a gifted and inspired poet. To return for a moment to Siegel's animals: I suppose most poets keep a bestiary for use in registering their subjective responses to the natural world. When Whitman's mockingbird calls forlornly for its mate, or Hardy's "blast-beruffled" thrush bursts out in "full-hearted evensong," we know these birds are projections of the poet's state of mind (in Hardy's case, an ironic one, of course); Siegel's beasts differ in that they seem to exist not for the poet's convenience but in their own right as creatures of a mysterious, marvelous- though often disturbing- natural order. These poems ask us to enter imaginatively into the creature's mysterious life and to experience its own awareness of the world. Here for example, from Pentecost, is a spider that has spun its web across a windowpane ("Spider"): the great square of day shone dim as the white eye of the sun climbed up and I saw the beautiful design of myself flex silver in all directions. The small gnats fly to it in admiration and sing, fascinated, as I weave them into it and drink their song, my hunger slightly abated. These lines render not only the spider's view of life but also suggest its transcendent value in the great song of being. Its predatory role as a stealthy devourer of the unwary is neither condoned nor condemned, since any judgment would imply a human scale of virtues-a sentimental view of nature which is neither scientific nor, in the fullest meaning of the word, religious. As Coleridge has it, "He prayeth best, who loveth best I All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, I He made and loveth all." Of course a poet who seeks God in nature must confront the problem of evil; and, in one of his most interesting poems, "The ~Serpent Speaks~ (Pentecost). Siegel portrays the father of evil as a fountain of suave eloquence and engaging worldly wisdom. With his Ashbery-like play of language and ideas, he nearly cons us into buying his version of history: "a string of boxcars / each a century stuffed to overflowing I until the last leaps the track." Yet, like Milton's Satan, whom he clearly resembles, this serpent is also finally constrained to speak the truth, admitting that he is "subservient I (and this is the bitterness beyond all blindness) I at the last to another purpose." It would seem, then, that evil has its own music and beauty, though Siegel suggests it will ultimately take the form of a requiem to its own defeat. Not all of Siegel's poetry concerns animals. In a sequence of fifteen sonnets he re-imagines scenes and characters from the New Testament giving them both the psychological realism and modern idiom of T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi." Siegel brings to life the prodigal son, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Saul, Judas, and others including certain neighbors of "the artisan's son turned wonderworker," who snidely comment on his crucifixion: "He didn't come to much!" Another group of poems deals with those revelations of the divine that may be found in everyday life. A charming poem to the poet's wife, "After Viewing the Bust of Nefertiti" (in both volumes), concludes, "you [are] the / image of that beauty and grace / who loves us with a human face." And a tribute to a grade-school music teacher, "God's Back" (Waters), suggests that not all mystics live in monasteries: "How it must have deafened Beethoven /To hear the divine tread fall again and again." Siegel turns the morning ritual of shave, shower, and breakfast into a rousing "Song of Praises" (Pentecost), and he brings a moving elegy for his father- "Carrying the Father" (both volumes)- to an evocative conclusion as he ponders the importance of images from our past in shaping our future selves: "this soil ever crumbling / in which you lay the still invisible garden." Taken together, these two volumes should supply a winter's worth of musings on the richness of our natural world and the human need to address such wonders-what Siegel calls the "hopeless addiction of the tongue I to an ecstasy of particulars" ("Half A Second,~ Pentecost). For those who might be wary of Siegel's religious affiliation, I would suggest that these poems are Christian in the best possible way. They neither preach -nor proselytize nor prohibit; they simply celebrate with hymns of praise the light that illumines all creation. |
| Thomas Bontly |
| Sewanee Review |
| Fall 2006 |
| Robert Siegel, A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press (P.O. Box 1568, Orleans, MA 02653), 2006. Pp. 179, $26.00 hb "A Poet," Keats wrote, "is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity…." Keats was of course thinking primarily of Shakespeare; and while times have changed, and it might well seem that in recent decades many poets have had altogether too much identity (what Keats, this time thinking of Wordsworth, called the "egotistical sublime"), Robert Siegel is not among them. His new collection, A Pentecost of Finches, is wide-ranging and self-effacing. In many poems he becomes some other. It seems safe to say that he has written the best poem in English as perceived from the awareness of a slug: White, moist, orange, I crawl up the cabbage leaf exposed, too much like your most intimate parts to be lovely, to be loved. I weep to the world, my trail a long tear.... There are more such startling changes. In various transformations the poet becomes a daddy longlegs, a snail, a deer tick, a tiger, a llama, a giant panda, an inchworm, a night crawler, a mussel, and more. Nothing is too small to escape Siegel's attention or too large to lie beyond his range. Again Keats comes to mind: "if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence [sic] and pick about the Gravel." While A Pentecost of Finches does not include a sparrow poem there is little in the chain of being that is omitted. No doubt Siegel could write from the perspective of a rock or tree or any other form whenever he chooses to do so. In this volume he moves through dazzling reinventions that Proteus himself would envy. No other contemporary poet comes to mind who could if he or she wished, write the definitive poem as perceived by, say, coral: poison ivy, lemons, sunscreen, moss, or tarmac. In various poems Siegel is an observer of creatures rather than the creatures themselves, and yet the identification is so close, the awareness so penetrating, that the difference in perspective hardly matters. The poet does not exactly disappear; rather, he creates himself through his perceptions. Consider, for example, the opening lines of "Silverfish": It lives in the damps of rejection, in the dark drain, feeding upon the effluvia of what we are, of what we've already been. Everything comes down to this: we are its living- the fallen hair, the fingernail, the grease from a pore, used toothpaste, a detritus of whiskers and dead skin. While the poet admits to feeling "a galvanic revulsion" and reaches out to crush the offending visitor, nevertheless his sympathies are such that even in this loathsome object he finds something of grace and beauty, something worthy of celebration: ... its body translucent, indefinable, an electric jelly moving with beautiful sweeps of the feet like a sinuous trireme, delicate and indecent, sexual and c1eopatric. It moves for a moment in the light, while its silver flashes and slides, and part of us notices an elusive beauty, an ingenious grace, in what has been cast off. What more could be said for this repulsive creature? Still, the attitude is far from sentimental- the writing is too intensely realistic, and the observation too precise, to permit sentimentality; rather, Siegel finds nothing in this natural world that lacks value or that is unworthy of compassionate attention. Intense awareness could be perceived, after all, as a form of praise. Siegel's poem "Rat" may change forever the reader's understanding of this much maligned rodent ("look on him kindly, for he I at last will carry you to a freedom beyond yourself ... ") Siegel's grasp extends to the human in addition to other forms of life; he is, after all, a novelist as well as a poet. The second sect ion of A Pentecost of Finches, entitled "Portraits," is a series of sonnets based on New Testament themes and incidents. Siegel imagines himself as Mary at the Annunciation, the Prodigal Son, Lazarus, Judas, and various others. The portraits are concise, engaging, sometimes startling, and often moving. Skillfully, Siegel varies the forms and uses rhyme, including frequent slant rhyme, with eloquent ease. Consider, for example, "Saul": Keeping the Law was a bore, the outer part, that is- nothing for a Pharisee such as he. But keeping the inner law of the heart- perverse self!- to that he lacked the key, ransacked the whole Sanhedrin. Then one day an idea seized him: he breathed it in like fire: something that would consume him totally. He felt the inner division heal as all conspired to make him champion of the faith. He offered to go wherever needed to put them back on the path- the blasphemers-to hold up the Law against all those in this semi pagan cult and bring down the wrath of Yahweh on them, while sinning not the least mote- the others stoning them while he held their coats. The music is subtle and generally subdued, but it is there for anyone who cares to hear it-as is the ironic portrayal of self-righteousness. Everywhere in this book a disciplined sense of craft is evident. Siegel does not, however, try to impress with his skills. He knows the value of restraint- in the manner, say, of Ben Jonson or George Herbert or Robert Frost. His lines go about their work with calm deliberation: unpretentious, unforced, luminously clear. "Shopping Together," for example, tells of a trip to the market. After the poet and his companion have checked out and placed their purchases in the car, the poem concludes: Once inside, all the way home, bags leaning lovesick against us, ice creams thawing in secret, we feed each other plums and dark cherries. Simple enough, no doubt. But the lines convey intimacy, desire, sexuality, sensuality, joy, and more. Like so much of Siegel's writing, they resonate with significance. (And, of course, if one is reminded of a certain notorious scene .in Tom Jones, either the book or the movie, that is all well and good. While much of A Pentecost of Finches is centered on spirituality, either present or awakening, Siegel knows that a full life involves body as well as soul.) Among the new poems in this book is "A Song of Praises," a canticle of gratitude for the ordinary as the poet wakes into a world of simple satisfactions. Every morning becomes a sacramental beginning, a cause for celebration, as in his lines of praise for the steam of the shower, the apprehensive shiver and then its warm enfolding of the shoulders its falling on the head like grace its anointing of the whole body and the soap 's smooth absolution.... The language of spirituality ("grace," "anointing," "absolution") merges easily with the language of physical being ("shoulders," "head," "body"). The cleansing of the morning shower becomes baptismal, diurnally renewed. Every day is miraculous. The spirit of Whitman hovers behind this poem, as does that of Christopher Smart and the one poet who is given an eponymous poem in this collection, Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), whose celebration of this earthly existence knew no bounds: Give but to things their true esteem And those which now so vile and worthless seem Will so much fill and please the mind That we shall there only riches find. ("Right Apprehension [1]") Finally, the shortest poem in the book, from which the title is taken. It is called "A.M.," and here it is, all of it: Yellow flames flutter about the feeder: a Pentecost of finches. The poem is characteristic Siegel: concise and simple, yet musical, language; sharp and focused perception; awakening to revelation; the sacramental sense of being. Siegel is alluding, of course, to the gathering of the disciples after the ascension of Jesus as described in Acts of the Apostles: And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2: 1-4) And so we move from finches at the feeder, perceived as flames, a sign from heaven, to the Pentecostal revelation. Or, better, we don't move a step: both are there simultaneously. Perception is all. Let Keats have, the final comment, which everywhere informs the aesthetic of A Pentecost of Finches: "Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject." |
| North Dakota Quarterly |
| Fall 2006 |
"You can stroke people with words," F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, a fitting observation when alluding to the many recent publications by Maine poets. Robert Siegel is surely high on any list to lookWe Also Recommend
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