January 2021
Almost Something Holy
The new year is here.
I always forget that Christmas is only a few days into winter. Many of us are just starting the long haul of cold. Here we’ve had one early, full snowstorm so far, and I’m ready for more. Find some good books, and settle in for the next few months.
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Do you have books that you occasionally think about, like long-gone friends who sneak into your memory? I would add Through a Small Ghost by Chelsea Dingman to my list. Her book is less than a year old—it was released in February 2020—but since that year has felt like a decade, the books pre-pandemic feel distant. Back then, I wrote at The Millions that her book was one of the best of the year, and I still think so. Her collection is my recommended book for this month.
One reason why Dingman’s book stays with me is her consistent concern with being whole and holiness, or perhaps the hole(s) within our spirit that might be divine. A returning speaker in Through a Small Ghost is a woman who carries the grief of her daughter’s stillbirth. “I wanted to give you the world,” she writes in one poem, and it is the type of phrase that permeates the book.
Another recurring element that I noted in my review for The Millions was how wind haunts this book, recalling John 3:8–“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” Wind is one of those everyday wonders that poetry can help renew.
In a similar way, poetry helps renew my sense of prayer. I say renew, but in renewing there is a sense of fracturing and fragmenting. While I think there is worth to the regularity of prayer—I think of the daily rosary-handlers in my family—there’s also worth to wayward prayers, incomplete prayers, prayers that resist the act of praying. In a formal and structural way, via lineated thought, poetry disconnects language from the monotony of prose. We have to pay attention to understand poetry, and that’s a good way to pray.
Speaking of that attempt, and struggle: “(I Refuse to Pray)” is this month’s poem. I’ve written before in this newsletter how I’m attracted to parentheses in poetry and prose, and here’s the rare one in a title. We don’t expect it at all, since a parenthesis is often a pause or explanation within an existing narrative, so by titling the poem in this manner, Dingman manages to invite us into an even closer experience with the narrator. We’re about to hear a whisper.
The narrator immediately clarifies that her statement is “a lie,” although it is not clear how—just yet. “But Jesus,” she continues, “I don’t know / you or your father.” Prayer often feels like the attempt to bridge that distance (what a fascinating and perhaps frightening thing prayer is—that talking into the dark, with any response often unseen and unfelt). The narrator, it seems, struggles to pray because of pain; her father and daughter are dead. She has become like the “edge of the pond / where someone once drowned.”
Then comes a sentence as its own line: “Where have you been hiding?”
It feels right to read these lines in January, when, like in the poem, it is winter, and “Green blades of grass are ghosts / now.” While crows wait for garbage to be tossed, the narrator also waits, and her statements might be directed to God: “Charm me. Harm me. It’s all the same.”
She ponders her body, how “it sags / like a six-month-old balloon.” The way her skin is “stretched into a makeshift shrine.” The body compels us to consider the spirit, and she again speaks: “Can you hear me? I want / less sky. Less sun. Less weather.”
The whisper becomes a bit more acute in these final stanzas. She tells us to listen, to hear that “the wind // is blessing every door” as it becomes night. She can almost hear the snow fall (try this, the next time that white falls from the sky—open the door or window, close your eyes, and feel it).
“I am almost // home, in this body.” And then: “Almost / something holy.”
Through a Small Ghost is full of poems this gorgeous and heartfelt.
Best wishes for 2021. See you next month.