Seeking the Best Books
By Douglas Talley

In one of the happiest commandments ever offered humanity God said:  [Y]ea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.  (Doctrine & Covenants 88:118).  What lover of books does not relish this invitation?  If the gospel required nothing else but obedience to this one commandment, a great many readers would have secured election to the celestial kingdom already.  Who knows, even a few literary critics would probably find a place!

One of the ways to seek out the best books is to apply a simple rule:  the best books contain the best lines.  The Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borges, once noted: 

After all these years I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent.  A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise.  There is no poet, however mediocre, who has not written the best line in literature, but also the most miserable ones.  Beauty is not the privilege of a few illustrious names.  It would be rare if this book did not contain one single secret line worthy of staying with you to the end. (From Los Conjurados, translated by Willis Barnstone in Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, Penguin Books, 2000).

Stone Spirits and the Nativity


The book of poems, Stone Spirits, by Susan Elizabeth Howe makes for happy reading, because not only has Sister Howe conceived a good number of lines “worthy of staying with the reader until the end”, she has conceived whole poems with that quality.  And whatever “miserable lines” might be lurking in her consciousness like any other poet’s, she has by and large managed to excise from this lovely little volume. 

Sister Howe is an associate professor in creative writing at Brigham Young University.  She completed her Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Denver and has published poems in the The New Yorker, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals.  The following, printed in whole with Sister Howe’s permission, is the finest Nativity poem I have ever read:

The Christmas story, repeated so often in the gospel of Luke, has for many readers become mere fable.  Perhaps the English poet Thomas Hardy captured the remote faintness of the story best in the poem, “The Oxen”

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                        (Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy, The Macmillan Company, 1966)

The Hardy poem is deservedly anthologized as one of the finest Nativity poems in the English language.  It skillfully frames the modern skeptic’s dilemma in wanting to believe, if only to recover the charm of childhood.

Poetry That Makes It Real

So how much better is the poem that actually succeeds in making the story real?  How much more does it deserve to be anthologized?  And how ironic is it, that “Mary Keeps All These Things” is one of the few poems in Stone Spirits that did not find placement even in a literary journal, let alone an anthology?

Consider the details Sister Howe collects to make the story real.  Mary’s water “breaks and runs down [her] leg, soaking [her] blue robe”.  The innkeeper has a “beard stained with mutton grease”.  The stable smells of “straw, urine, dung”.  Mary can feel “straw prickling [her] hair and ears, scratching the back of [her] neck”.  The baby is born with a “brash infant cry”.  The poem conjures the reality of the birth so well because it focuses on those details that are earthen and vivid.

But these details, earthen as they may be, are skillfully woven to transcend the earthly and to capture the celestial wonderment of birth in general, and of the Nativity in particular.  When Joseph brings the newborn to Mary’s arms, she is, like any mother of a healthy child, “seized by his perfection – tiny hands, clear unblinking eyes”.  However, the “perfection” Mary sees in her child is more than the common statement of health and wholeness.  We know it as a prelude, a maternal premonition, of the singular perfection her child would possess throughout his life.  This same spirit of prophecy continues when Mary calls her child a “dove”, a “calf”, a “young and wondrous lamb,” each of these metaphors alluding to animals offered in Jewish ritual sacrifices, as her child also would one day be offered.  So in another prophetic allusion, this time to the broken body of her child on a cross, Mary notes that the “small animal noises” she and her child make while nursing belong in the “shelter of the poor and dumb who break their bodies to sustain life.”

The bittersweet ironies of these innocent maternal observations crescendo into a final, overwhelming reverence for the glory of the newborn.  I simply do not tire of the poem’s final lines.  They remained with me as I read through the entire volume, and will probably remain with me through my entire life:

Thomas Hardy in referring to the Nativity noted “So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years!”  Grown out of childhood and belief himself, Hardy yearned to join believers at the stable and see oxen kneeling to the Christ child.  Sister Howe, through a quiet, understated faith, actually leads us there.  The inclusive pronoun, “we”, draws all of us into the mystery.  The implicit fellowship between author and reader causes us to join hands with her, as she herself joins hands with Mary and Joseph, and brings all “our faces low upon the ground” to find shelter “in the shadow of this small and brilliant life.”  How sweet and pleasant and spellbinding is the reverence she induces!  I hold these lines among the best literature has to offer. 

Howe's Original Mind

I could cite other entire poems in Stone Spirits worthy of the same examination and praise.  The wonderfully daffy title “In the Cemetery, Studying Embryos” sets up another sublime gospel truth – the reality of the resurrection – again related in a pleasing, modest understatement.  I do not want to betray the delight waiting in the final lines of the poem, but a single metaphor provides a sufficient teaser:

These lines reflect one of several gifts Sister Howe displays throughout her work, a gift for uncommon and unusual associations, which may be just another way of saying she has an original mind.  Who goes to a cemetery and sees in the skeleton lying below ground a living fetus?  Such an association stretches imagination beyond belief, and yet Sister Howe not only suspends the reader’s disbelief, with a few additional tricks by sleight-of-hand as it were, she may even persuade the skeptic by the end of the poem to consider the possibility of the resurrection. 

The following are just a few more of the interesting associations found in Stone Spirits:

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Vivid Metaphor

Another poetic gift displayed throughout Stone Spirits is a gift for vivid metaphor.  The poems are worth reading just to chance upon a few gems like these:  the explosions of fireworks are “glittering pink chrysanthemums, red green silver peonies, weeping willows of gold”; chickadees have “diamond hearts primed to spark”; a mist laden morning lake is “the holy circle”, a “great silver bowl to wash” in.  These metaphors are fresh and compelling without being forced or contrived.

Finally, the poetic gift in Stone Spirits, which I prize above all others, is its quality in a handful of poems to deepen my faith by affirmation, as found in the prayer-like nature of “Mountain Psalm”:

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It is relatively easy in modern literature to find poetry that deepens the faith of a Latter-day Saint by challenging it.  The gates leading to that experience are wide and many, and while such poetry can nonetheless be beautiful and useful, how much more refreshed I feel when a poet like Sister Howe deepens my faith by affirming it.  And in truth, I wonder if this is not the poet’s more difficult task, to affirm belief without slipping into the clichés of a dry and stale worship, like an uninspired testimony.

If I sound enthusiastic about Stone Spirits, I am.  A critic should not have to be clever about such things.  Barely a poem exists in this slender volume without one or two lines of real staying power.  What is more, only a rare reader could search this book without finding several whole poems worth keeping an entire lifetime.  If there are faults in Sister Howe’s book, I am too dazzled by its strengths to notice or to care.   

Look for an interview with Susan Elizabeth Howe in a future Meridian column.  As always, submissions from Meridian’s readership are encouraged.  If my response to submissions seems slow, I apologize but the press of daily affairs has left me with a huge backlog.  I promise to reply.