Cameron Brooks

Cameron Brooks is a South Dakota poet, who lives in Sioux Falls. He earned his MA in theological studies from Princeton Seminary, and more-recently an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University, where he had Scott Cairns, Jennifer Maier, and Mischa Willett as professors. He is representative of a new generation of Christian poets who captures the universal through the particularity of place and of his own experience.

His first poetry collection, Forbearance, has just appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. I am pleased to have been able to work with Cameron Brooks as his editor.

Bruce Beasley calls this new book: “a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, ‘gaunt silo[s]’ of South Dakota’s High Plains.” And says that “Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself…”

The following poem is from Forbearance.

The Mower and the Nun

The man who mows the ditch
between the strips of interstate
found it worthwhile to leave us
patches of wild sunflowers
every several miles.
Even at eighty-per-hour
you can't miss ‘em: sunny thumbprints
pressed against the paper
bag browns of late September.
I will never thank him.

And I will never thank the nun
I saw watering her brittle yard
with a hose—in full garb!
That strange religious habit
of the celibate salt of this dearth.
Doesn't she know October
is coming and November is coming
and December comes only to steal
and kill and destroy? She knows
life, life abundantly.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Madeline DeFrees*

Madeline DeFrees (1919—2015) is the author of eight full-length poetry collections. In 1937 she entered the order of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, and took on the name of Sister Mary Gilbert. It was under this name that she published her early poetry, including her first collection, From the Darkroom (1964). Her greatest influences have perhaps been Hopkins, and Dickinson.

She is one of the poets featured in my anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry — (available here) and through Amazon.

When asked — in a 2009 Image interview with Jennifer Maier — about the pressure within the convent to avoid individuality, as she was developing as a poet, she said:
----"There was a lot of internal pressure away from poetry. I knew
----Hopkins had given it up because he thought it would interfere
----with prayer...I used to think that because poetry required a
----kind of total attention, and so did prayer, that they went
----together. I had superiors, at least one, who told me that I
----wasn’t anything special just because I was a poet. I knew I
----wasn’t supposed to be writing poems when I was supposed to be
----praying. But they really are very close."

DeFrees was released from her vows in 1973. She explained why her poems would rarely be seen as being particularly Christian:
----"I used to think that the reason I didn’t write religious poems
----was that I really respected religion, and there was nothing worse
----than a poem that wanted to be religious and fell short of the
----mark. The main shortcoming would be sentimentality."

The following poem is from her collection Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems (2001, Copper Canyon).

Balancing Acts

At 47, Hope's driven to find her feet in construction.
She crawls the hip roof of her house like a cat burglar,
gives herself plenty of rope, lashed to
the chimney. In her left hand, she carries a loaded
staple gun. Her right grips the insubstantial.

Cordless phone in my lap, I watch at 74, from my rented
wheelchair, fingers tattooing 9-1-1.
Let me hop with the help of the Sunrise Medical Guardian
to the open door to rehearse
our common fate. We are Siamese joined by a bungee

cord at the inner ear, that delicate point of balance.
Every day we devise new methods
of locomotion. When my walker, upset by a comforter,
collapses to the floor and takes me
with it, I want to reverse the digits:

four and seven, seven and four. Yesterday, Hope wrestled
the circular saw over the edge
where she clung to the ridge and tripped on the safety
cord. It was then I heard the Sirens
wooing Ulysses tied to the mast. Twilight hangs fire

in the west, then snuffs it out. Behind the slant roof
of a dormer, Hope disappears. Two ladders
reach into the void. Is that white flash a sneakered
foot in search of a rung? I conjure a cloudy head
between the smokestack and the evergreen.

No matter how I strain, I cannot bring her back.
Reluctantly I fiddle with the blind,
hear a tune old as the burning of Rome as I weave
between the cave and the whirlpool for a saving
equilibrium. What if I call her Faith,
the evidence of things unseen?

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Madeline DeFrees: first post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Mischa Willett

Mischa Willett teaches English at Seattle Pacific University, where his specialty is nineteenth century poetics. He has taught at Washington University and Northwest University, and has served as Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Tuebingen in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. His poems have appeared in Books & Culture, Christian Century and Grain, and in his 2013 chapbook, Lunatic.

Scott Cairns has said that, "Mischa Willett has a music all his own, albeit a music informed by years of his attending to the inexhaustible songs that comprise both world poetry and sacred text."

Willett's first full-length poetry collection, Phases, is the newest book in the Poiema Poetry Series. I am pleased to have assisted him as the editor for this collection. Many poems in Phases interact with the classical period or are set in Rome. It is, therefore, note-worthy that this summer he and poet Jennifer Maier will be leading a study trip to Rome with Seattle Pacific University.

Pastoral

Let us not overlook, he says looking out over
us from the lectern like a shepherd
with a crook of words bent on folding
us back into our pen, or penning
us back to our fold, the stupidity
and defenselessness of sheep.
We bleat: in this analogy, who
are we? He proceeds. Goats, you
see, can handle themselves. Horns
and hoofs, cranial helmets they ram
full tilt into posts, or other goats. But sheep
mind you, sheep have no homing device,
which is why stories begin with a lost one;
they’re even known to head toward danger
—oh look, a wolf! Let’s check it out!— in dumb
allegiance to the interesting, which I find
interesting, and think: how to amend
our sheepish ways? But he, to drive
home both the point and oh ye,
sighs it’s beyond you; beyond me.

Phases is available from Cascade Books.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Jennifer Maier

Jennifer Maier is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. She is the author of two poetry collections, the first of which — Dark Alphabet — won the Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry First Book Award, and was named one of the Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets. In 2012 she received The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award for her poem "fly" which is inspired by a line in a Dickinson poem.

Maier is an associate editor with Image. The following is from her second poetry collection Now, Now (2013, University of Pittsburgh Press).

Annunciation with Possum and Tomatoes

Faith in spring, is a fertile bed, the hope of things
unseen — summer, round in the hand; toil, expectancy, ripe
weight. Grace, for a possum, is another thing:
a sleeping dog, an open gate, five soft globes,

each bite, a new beginning. She ate them all,
but afterward I dreamed I saw a jungle of tomatoes
grown wild against the house, the fruit hanging fat, allegorical,
as the red canopy in Dieric Bouts's Annunciation,

in which the Virgin, surprised in her bedchamber,
looks up from her book, as the Flemish angel, plain
and reliable as a school nurse, calmly delivers the news.
His right finger points up at the Father,

or at the tomato-shaped folds of the drapery, as he explains
about the fruit of the womb, how it will ripen and spill
to repair the blight in the garden, the one that begot death
and beauty in turn, having first made thieves of us all.

Bouts's Holland would not taste tomatoes for another century;
the plague was swallowing citizens left and right,
but the good people of Haarlem still donned their peasant
leggings and took to the field. Perhaps the ploughman,

framed moments ago in the Gothic arch of the Virgin's window,
has set down his rake and is resting in the shade of a tree,
thinking about the fall and its hungers, and about himself,
kin to all mortal creatures, the ones who sow, and the ones

who plunder after them, who wake famished in the night,
all furred appetite, dreaming of a fruit they have never known:
flesh and seed, crotch and vine, its taste in the mouth sharp
as the known world, delectable as Eden.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.