Christian verse, in the past several years, has become a progressively substantial driver of poetry as an art, increasing in quality and quantity even as ‘popular’ verse charges headlong into irrelevance. As popular presses and elite tastemakers attempt to rebrand activists as ‘poets,’ offering them massive book deals despite their manifest technical incompetence and gross illiteracy, appreciators and creators of excellent verse are turning their attentions elsewhere, to small publishing houses where quality still rules: Wiseblood Books, Arouca Press, and Solum Literary Press, to name a few.
From Solum comes this year’s Below the Brightness, a debut collection of 54 short poems by Steven Searcy. The poems in the collection are predominantly single-page works, although a few extend to a second page. Their comparatively short length, however, belies their technical and expressive excellence. The rear cover promises verses that “aim to offer an honest expression of the frail and flawed human condition,” and includes a fulsome endorsement by no less a figure than Malcolm Guite, amongst other luminaries. But of particular interest is the explanation that the collection “explores the life of the spirit” in lines that “look to the danger and beauty of the natural world.” In essence, Searcy seeks to participate in the Christian recovery of a vision of nature that had been almost entirely given over to the Romantics and their descendants.
Debut collections can be rather hit-or-miss affairs, with verses good and indifferent jostling side-by-side. Happily, Searcy’s collection is exemplary in this regard, and virtually every poem in the volume has something to offer: an exceptional feel for poetic technique and a keen-eyed insight into the human condition are both on display in lines which are certain to edify and delight. A strong thread of neo-formalism undergirds his verses, even those which are calculated departures from established forms, with the result that his poetic choices seem determined rather than accidental or random. And, the focus of his lines, the insights on offer, are genuinely perceptive—no pseudo-profundity here. Instead, when Searcy’s poetic touch rests upon a natural image or an aspect of the human condition, the reader is assured that what follows will be worth the reflection.
Given the impossibility of reviewing all 54 poems, this review will consider two poems from the collection—“Standing in the Wind,” and “A Little Thing”—as representative of the quality of the whole.
“Standing in the Wind”
The second poem in the collection, “Standing in the Wind,” is divided into three rhymed stanzas: the first two are quatrains in iambic pentameter with minor substitutions, and the last stanza is in nine lines of decreasing metrical length. This change in structure and order is paralleled by a shift in the poem’s focus—discussed below—demonstrating the poet’s grasp of metrical function not only as a means of imposing a general order on poetic expression, but also as a mode that is itself capable of representing the content of the poem.
The first stanza includes many instances of alliteration, with autumn/afternoon, strong/soft/shoulders/sun, loose/leaves, speeding/scattered, and cotton/clouds. These similar sounds are paired with a rhyme scheme ABBA, so that a recurrence of sound features prominently throughout the stanza. This reverberation is mirrored in the narrative content of the stanza, which describes the wind blowing fallen autumn leaves along the ground—an action accompanied by the repetitive clicking and rushing of leaves brushing against the ground and one another. Further poetic skill is on display with the first line’s, “This autumn afternoon the wind is strong / and gentle,” enjambed into the second line, with the delayed qualification “gentle” reversing the potential threat of the autumn wind’s strength. As with a true autumn wind, there is always the possibility of a gale which only experience may dispel: the first line suggests inclemency before the second line offers a more agreeable outlook to the reader, with a wind that is “soft on the shoulders” under sunny skies.
The second stanza continues the theme of the wind’s power, hidden beneath its momentarily “gentle” expression. The individual leaves are hidden as well, brought together in “the canopy of green / and yellow” which overarches “the lake’s / bright top.” As the movement becomes more general and less specific, the poem directs attention to how the wind’s “force untamed” is visible only by what it moves, “unseen / except through what it lifts and bends and shakes.” But this is true of other forces, equally untamed, which move the world, as will be seen throughout the poems in this collection and in the other poems under review here.
In the second line of the final stanza, the poet enters the poem for the first time, declaring, “my heart is stirred, I ask for nothing more.” The wind, it seems, has moved him as surely as it has spun the fallen leaves and sent ripples across the water. But the metaphorical connexion implied in the second stanza is made explicit by the third and fourth lines of the final stanza, with the poet’s exhortation, “Lord, do not let me be a stone, / still in the wind, unmoved, unblown,” signalling that the Lord is just such a power in this mortal world—ever-present, untamed, and seen in what He moves and bends to His will. The speaker in the poem is not moved by the wind, but by the presence of God, who has visibly entered the poem at almost the same moment as the speaker himself, even though both were invisibly present from the very beginning. Now, in recognition of this fact, the speaker asks the Lord to set him free “to soar, / to dance” just as the leaves do in the opening stanza of the poem, heightening the poem’s satisfying circularity of theme and metaphor.
“A Little Thing”
Most of the poems in Below the Brightness do not begin with epigraphs, but one exception is “A Little Thing,” which begins with a quote from Julian of Norwich’s Shewings: “…he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand…” This quote, excerpted from The Shewings, does not include context which clarifies what the “little thing” is, but the original passage is not at all unclear in this regard. In fact, it is the question that immediately occurs to Julian herself:
Also in this He shewed a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of my hand, and it was as round as a balle. I lokid there upon with eye of my understondyng and thowte, What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is made.
The original passage is worth knowing in full, because the poem silently relies upon its explanation, and even returns to quote its language in the second stanza. As for the stanzas, there are five (n.b. the epigraph is taken from the fifth chapter of The Shewings), each of four lines of predominantly iambic metre, rhyming ABBA and of increasing metrical length. The first two stanzas are in dimeter, following by one stanza each in pentameter, hexameter, and heptameter. The suggestion is of something which grows over time, like a nut, planted and eventually flowering forth into a sapling and then a mighty tree: for, as the third stanza notes, “the universe expands.”
The poem also works against this idea, however, maintaining the small size of the “little thing” which is the subject of both the title and the epigraph. What changes is the speaker’s understanding of the little thing, which scales up in size as the poet explores its meaning. For the little thing—which Julian relates “is all that is made”—begins with the simplicity of the idea and ends with an attempt to understand the vastness that lies behind the idea: not just the world, but its creator.
The idea of the universe in a nutshell is, as the poem’s first stanza notes, “simple”; it is “pleasant and terse.” But the second stanza turns to “the Lord of glory”—hardly something small and simple—and identifies Him as the one “who speaks the story / of all that is.” Here there is an echo of The Shewings, where the hazelnut is explained as “all that is made.” Drawing these two together, the poem argues that God speaks the universe into being, small as it is, enclosed in His divine hands.
For the speaker, it is “that marble in his hands” which is the object of human fascination—a problematic fascination, because “it’s all too small to fill our hearts.” Goodness, the poet notes, comes from God: “He holds it all,” like he holds the “little thing” which contains the entirety of creation. Pausing on these lines, one cannot help but think of Hamlet saying, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.” In Searcy’s poem, and Julian’s Shewings, the nutshell is the universe, in which one might well feel “a king of infinite space.” But the poem forces us to reckon with the Prince of Denmark’s difficulty in its final lines:
why do we try to sleep scrunched up inside a hazel nut,
when every single night we could be resting in a king?
Psalm 37:7 is well known in its KJV translation of “Rest in the Lord,” where “rest” means “rest assured”—confident trust, in this case that the Lord will see to one’s affairs. An absence of this “rest” is indeed what plagues Hamlet, forcing him to reckon himself with justice for his murdered father, to general ruin. But it is also what plagues human beings, who turn towards their own devices inside the nutshell, whilst forgetting the power that made it and them.
“He sees / our need and offers us himself,” the speaker reminds us, in a line enjambed across stanzas, forcing the reader to dwell a little longer on the staggering omniscience of God before turning to our human needs. Patience is essential for we “restless folks,” who are so keen to have our desire that we find ourselves fascinated by the world inside of the nutshell, thereby “losing / sight of the sturdy, ageless arms, refusing / the maker.” In “A Little Thing,” the speaker urges us to turn our attentions to the greater truths that underpin what we believe to be all that there is, certain that resting in the Lord will protect us not only from Hamlet’s “bad dreams” but also from the snares of the enemies which the Psalmist laments. In this poem, and throughout his text, Searcy reminds us that only through patience and trust can we understand creation in all its wondrousness and avoid being made captive to its narrow confines.
