As the calendar year draws to the close, the Church year begins anew with the season of Advent. For a few weeks, a strange dichotomy exists. The secular world thinks about endings, and looks back retrospectively on accomplishments and challenges from the year behind. But the Church looks forward in hope to peace and goodwill, and the salvation of mankind soon to be heralded by the arrival of the new-born king: a moment in which God is at once imminent and immanent.
It is, therefore, felicitous that Jesse Keith Butler’s debut book of verse, The Living Law, should cross this reviewer’s desk at precisely this time, with its five thematic section-headings of “Immanence,” “The Root of Jesse,” “Songs of Unrest,” “The Writer’s Retreat,” and “Imminence.” A collection of poems written over the course of two decades, the text runs to just over one hundred pages, compassing nearly fifty poems, including the eight-page long “The Lawgiver,” a poem so substantial that it is deserving of its own review, perhaps alongside the volume’s other long poem, “Hospitality.” Butler’s poetry demonstrates an exceptional facility with form and an unerring ear for the natural rhythm of language. In this, his work compares favourably with his countryman, the ‘Bard of the Yukon,’ Robert Service, especially in Butler’s “The Hammer That Killed John Henry.”
Under review here, however, are the two poems which bookend the collection, both of relatively medium length, and which demonstrate important thematic links with the rest of the collection: “The Living Law,” the first poem in the volume and that which gives the collection its title; and “The 613,” the final poem in the collection, which echoes the scriptural references around which the work as a whole seems almost to revolve. From a collection so diverse of form, it is difficult to select poems that can adequately represent the style of the whole; however, the two poems under review certainly show the high quality maintained throughout the volume and across the poems collected within it.
“The Living Law”
“The Living Law,” which opens the volume, provides one of the strongest starts to any collection examined by this reviewer. Written in rhyming, anapestic verse, the structure opens with a first line iamb that immediately establishes a strong rhythm; three anapests follow with a feminine ending that leads immediately into the following line’s iamb (effectively creating thereby another anapest), with two more anapests to conclude that line. Then, that two-line tetrameter-trimeter structure is repeated; the rhyme scheme here is of the form ABAB. A line break separates the first four lines from the next, where the metrical structure is repeated with a different rhyme scheme: lines 1, 3, and 4 are all near rhymes, and line 2 always rhymes with ‘law.’ Then, a concluding set of three lines ends the stanza: an iamb with a feminine ending, leading into the word “living,” and then the word “law.” Each stanza follows in general this form.
The complexity of the structure as blandly described in print belies the instinctual rhythm of the poetry as it strikes the ear. This will readily be seen with an example, as in the case of the first stanza:
Our bus leaves the prairies, I’m done with the flatness
that stretches for days without break.
Those long strained horizons are too much to witness.
Your eyes and your mind start to ache.
The landscape breaks out into ridges and gullies,
with purpose shown through every flaw.
Some days you can scrape back the world’s shallow polish,
and glimpse at the wisdom at work in its fullness:
a deep and
living
law.
The best anapestic verse manages to be instantly memorable without seeming too simplistic or childlike. At this time of year, Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” naturally springs to mind. A more unusual comparison might be Edward Gorey’s macabre work, The Insect God. But whether it is compared to Moore’s “’Twas the night before Christmas” or Gorey’s dark story of Millicent Frastley’s bizarre and unhappy demise, Butler’s “The Living Law” adopts a far more complex structure, not only metrically but also in terms of its rhyme scheme, and with the added challenge of adopting the terminal syntax of each stanza to suit the repeated closing structure. The success of the poem’s formal features aids Butler in creating instantly memorable lines within a forceful metrical system, all without ever verging into puerility.
The poem’s topic could hardly be more serious: how the fullness of creation testifies to its divine origins. The living law is, in one aspect, the full panoply of experiences through which human beings encounter the divine plan for the universe and for themselves as individuals. It is ‘living’ because it is through the very process of living that it is encountered, and also because the ‘law’ is not a set of legalistic precepts but rather the ordered universe, ever-unfolding and changing, but guided by the design of its unmoved God. In the first stanza, quoted above, this can be seen in the description of “ridges and gullies / with purpose shown through every flaw”: the use of “purpose” here indicates absolute conformity with the divine will, contrasted with the imperfect (and chronologically later) human perception of “every flaw.”
Throughout the poem, the reader is invited to enter into the action without ever being dragged into it perforce. The use of the second-person possessive (“Your eyes and your mind”) seems to personalise the poem’s message still further, involving the reader directly in the experiences described, along with the first-person plural possessive in phrases like “Our bus,” which opens the poem. These turns of phrase operate liminally, offering the prospect of readerly involvement without grammatically requiring it: “Our bus,” refers to the speaker and other passengers; “Your eyes” is hypothetical rather than literally second-person. The reader must choose to accept the invitation—to imagine himself alongside the speaker on the bus, occupying the hypothetical position of the viewer of “long strained horizons.” Here, too, the poem’s meaning is represented in its subtle choices: because the living law is absolute and totalising, all persons are subject to it and involved within it as constituent parts; but their acknowledgement of this reality is optional; they are invited, not forced, to see themselves within it.
Nature is challenging; not only can the horizons bring on headache, but the setting sun has “edges as sharp / as the blade of a circular saw.” The attempt to reduce the journey into an opportunity for idealised serenity and frictionless contemplation is revealed to be just so much Romantic fantasy. Importunate humanity, too, proves disruptive: “someone / keeps snoring a couple rows back,” and then, “An old woman’s searching the floor with a case. / She asks for help finding her teeth.” The speaker faintly bristles, at first, and then realises the error of his ways: “it’s like I don’t know that we’re all living under / the one same / living / law.” It is his recognition of this shared experience, impossible to escape, that prevents him—and us, as readers—turning away not only from the “big earnest face” of the old woman, but from the “reciprocal dance” of the final lines. We, too, should join in “and love the / living / law.”
“The 613”
The final poem in the collection is titled, “The 613,” which title operates on two different levels: the scene is first set in Ottawa, where the telephone area code is 613 (hence, the area may colloquially be known as ‘the 613’); and, the Jewish torah contains 613 commandments. The poem identifies these meanings in the first and second of its three stanzas, respectively, before moving on to reflect on the larger connexions in its final stanza.
Those stanzas are, themselves, arranged in a structure which mirrors the title: each is of ten lines written predominantly in iambic pentameter, subdivided in groups of six, one, and three lines. A recurring rhyme scheme is also present, with the second and fifth lines of each stanza rhyming, and the eighth and tenth likewise. Each stanza is set off from the next by a short horizontal line. The incorporation of the poem’s subject matter into its formal structure recalls the collection’s theme of a living law that provides order to the universe—something to which “The 613” returns in its final lines.
The first stanza opens with, “A winter night in Ottawa is monstrous.” At once, nature is cast not as friendly and regenerative, but as oppositional and oppressive. “The wind shrieks down,” leaving the speaker’s fingers “cold and stiff.” The “bleak hours” find him unable to find the least succour in nature, which is mirrored by the disinterest of the human city “abandoned by the bureaucrats.” Phone calls go unanswered, and soon “We’re lost beneath this restless regulation,” language that once again draws the reader into the poem’s action. Here, the regulation that afflicts is at once both bureaucratic and natural: the regulation of ordinances and by-laws, and the regulation of seasons and climate. Neither are swift to respond to the individual’s plaintive lament. Down, in the whirling blizzard, “Near Parliament, at Wellington and Bank” (words which conjure up the massive edifice of the British imperial legacy), the speaker’s “phone goes blank.” For even our cellular technology, that marvel of modern human artifice, must kneel to the potency of a deeper and more ancient order.
After the smartphone screen goes dark, the second stanza pivots away from the whirling frost of the street corner, to open with the wisdom of “Some old Rabbinic scholars,” who counted each mitzvah of the Torah: “The number / by must accounts: six hundred and thirteen.” But the patient calculation of the wise “feels small and thin” to the speaker, who suggests that such things are a distraction, albeit a potent and dazzling one: “so focused on the gold that plates the altar, / you fail to see the fiery pillar rising.” The hypothetical second person ‘you’ slips in, implicating the reader—not unjustly, perhaps—for focusing on the number and arrangement of lines in each stanza, or on the dual meaning of the punning title, and potentially missing the idea of order on which the poem turns.
“The Psalmist knew: / The law has life,” the conclusion of the second stanza reminds us, calling the reader back to the theme of the poem which opened the collection. “It is a gateway, opening to offer / a wide abundant space in which to live.” But it is only ever an offer, an invitation. Nevertheless, will or no, everyone and everything is subject to the law, whether natural, human, or mechanical. Fighting against it leads to a kind of opposition and unending strife, but recognising the reality of the ultimate order affords at least the prospect of something more.
The final lines gesture towards the inability to escape the underlying orders that structure existence. As the snow is ploughed away, the speaker realises that he stays “in vague obedience.” At once, the poem reassures: “But spring is seeping. Water drips. I turn / to feel warm light through mounds of ice and gravel.” It is as if, in recognising that there is some kind of order to which one must offer even only a “vague obedience,” the speaker is rewarded. As the hard frost gives way beneath “the sun’s repentance,” the speaker confesses that he will “grow to thank the living law.” In almost unwitting obedience, he has come to accept the divine will which thaws snow and human hearts, and which is capable of bringing even the most recalcitrant being into acceptance of its providential and redemptive design.
