Reviews

Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap

jimmylorunning's review against another edition

4.0

It never hurts immediately, father. Or son. Or holy spirit.
As I was in the beginning, nests and shells, and ever shall be. World, still hidden, Amen.

I'm friends with Sarah, so I have had time to know her through both poems and life. I used to think her poems were difficult, but her voice has only grown deeper with time, by which I mean the time I have had to read more and more of her poems has made that difficulty almost irrelevant. Now, her poems make a very immediate sense to me, in the way that poems are meant to do. Poems filled with her intimate language, her intuitive leaps, and her ear for music and odd rhythms. This book in particular is often about the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, but you won't find the familiar motherhood cliches here. Because Sarah pays attention. Her experience is one of hushed silence, a reverence that includes the irreverent, the erotic, and the small sillinesses of private musing. I really loved this book.

Pandemonium

Palace, cathedral: the thickening light in the heart of the house.

Tiny bug buried below the rock

or drawn like the moth

toward light? Little daemon. Unfaithful
part of the house. What is the first thing

the house took. Upright spirit, pound the floors,

pound the hearth, and who would save the house.

Who would kill the house

with a whisper inside the house. The slow and the detailed
thickening at the house. The house thickening

and the heat

thickening to ornate the house. Heat thickens
deep to the house. Heat that would snarl the cathedral,

heat would wilderness

the steeple. Heat would break and rebuild
the whole hell, that held house.