Martha Serpas

Angels and Visitors

Arts & Literature

“One of the marvelous surprises in Angels and Visitors is its subdued cadence. . . . Sens quietly opens his novitiate spirit to a sacred realm where the word ‘angel’ is transformed. The ‘Cellular Angel’ ‘is ‘the Angel of here and there,’ he writes. That call and response, as with the Angels of Wall, Ropes, Technicolor, Rain, and others, becomes a singular and satisfying intonation.”

Reaching Forever

Arts & Literature

“From Reaching Forever’s wide-ranging collection of lyrics, midrash, and narratives—characters from the street, from the Bible, from nature—I choose to begin with Philip C. Kolin’s figure of water, for I have long been a disciple of water’s spiritual lessons. But his River and Gulf are wonderfully strange to me, transformed into keepers of sacred mysteries. The opening poem, ‘Baptism,’ declares that the artist’s ‘canvas/must be submerged/to be seen,’ a paradox affirming the Creator’s vision over what is ‘real’ in the human world. Later a powerful chiasm closes ‘River Burial’: ‘But submerged sins keep coming back to shore;/the river returns the remains of the dead each night.’ What is not of God and what has not been in right relation with God will not enjoy God’s paradoxical gnosis. I am haunted by the word ‘submerged,’ the ‘dipping under’ that represents hiddenness and revelation at once. If, as in ‘Let Their Be Land,’ the tombstones cannot be read ‘because no one can find them,’ how will we gain initiation into these mysteries? A gorgeous passage from ‘Soft Sifting,’ late in the collection, portends: Our passing was meant to be a soft sifting like an ark with holes returning us to earth after each seeping rain. And in ‘When God Arrives,’ we are told, ‘you realize you do not/have to wear/your body anymore.’ From its mysterious, paradoxical title to its unifying voice, Reaching Forever is a moving, expansive meditation on the ‘already’ as also the ‘not yet.’”

What Cannot Be Fixed

Arts & Literature

“Baumgaertner most astonishes me when she creates poems seemingly ex nihilo, or better, from her own wisdom rather than from received narratives (yet those symphonic bits of midrash are quite beautiful, too). Poems like 'The Creator Dreams Creation,' 'Ecclesiastes,' 'Complex Phenomena,' and many others dissolve any boundary between reader and page: a consecrated out-of-time opens, a hyphen that transcends everything it might claim to unite--language, experience, death, and life.”