Richard Jones*

Richard Jones is an accomplished poet, who has been the editor of the journal Poetry East ever since he founded it in 1980. He has taught at DePaul University in Chicago since 1987, and is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including The Blessing: New & Selected Poems (2000, Copper Canyon).

His latest collection is Stranger on Earth (2018, Copper Canyon). Andrew Jarvis wrote in the New York Journal of Books that most of these prose poems are “…derived from memories, and Jones utilizes his memories of family, history, and culture to craft poems full of clear images and rich detail…” He says the “concept of beauty, and all things beautiful, is explored in the majority of these poems…” and points out that Marcel Proust’s philosophy ― “Life of every day is supremely important” ― is central to the book.

Back in 2007 when a number of artists (including poets B.H. Fairchild and Sydney Lea) were asked by Image to express why they believe in God, Richard Jones responded straight-forwardly,
----------“I believe in God because the poetry of the scriptures
----------revealed him to me. By God’s grace I opened the Bible
----------and discovered his near and palpable presence. Now, when
----------I read, illuminated by the Spirit, I give thanks as I find
----------myself abandoning my own limited understanding to seek
----------his perfect will…”

The Manifestation

The night of the Perseid shower,
thick fog descended
but I would not be denied.
I had put the children to bed,
knelt with them,
and later
in the quiet kitchen
as tall red candles
burned on the table between us,
I’d listened to my wife’s sweet imprecations,
her entreaties to see a physician.
But at the peak hour—
after she had gone to bed,
and neighboring houses
stood solemn and dark—
I felt no human obligation
and went without hope into the yard.
In the white mist
beneath the soaked and dripping trees,
I lifted my eyes
into a blind nothingness of sky
and shivered in a white robe.
I couldn’t see the outline
of the neighbor’s willows,
much less the host of streaking meteorites
no bigger than grains of sand
blazing across the sky.
I questioned the mind, my troubled thinking,
and chided myself to go in,
but looking up,
I thought of the earth
on which I stood,
my own
scanty plot of ground,
and as the lights passed unseen
I imagined glory beyond all measure.
Then I turned to the lights in the windows—
the children’s nightlights,
and my wife’s reading lamp, still burning.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Richard Jones: first post.

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.

Scott Cairns*

Scott Cairns is the 2014 winner of the Denise Levertov Prize. Earlier this year his seventh poetry book, Idiot Psalms, was published by Paraclete Press. He is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at the University of Missouri. Every June, on the Greek island of Thasos he directs an annual 4-week writing workshop. Newly available is Parable—a CD of Scott Cairns reading his poetry—recorded by Roy Salmond in Vancouver.

B.H. Fairchild has said that Cairns "is steadily making himself indispensable to the richness and breadth of contemporary poetry, an ascent confirmed both beautifully and movingly in Idiot Psalms."

The following poem first appeared in Poetry.

Idiot Psalm 3
—a psalm of Isaak, whispered mid the Philistines, beneath the breath

Master both invisible and notoriously
---------slow to act, should You incline to fix
---------Your generous attentions for the moment
---------to the narrow scent of this our appointed
---------tedium, should you—once our kindly
---------secretary has duly noted which of us
---------is feigning presence, and which excused, which unexcused,
---------You may be entertained to hear how much we find to say
---------about so little. Among these other mediocrities,
---------Your mediocre servant gets a glimpse of how
---------his slow and meager worship might appear
---------from where you endlessly attend our dreariness.
Holy One, forgive, forgo and, if You will, fend off
---------from this my heart the sense that I am drowning here
---------amid the motions, the discussions, the several
---------questions endlessly recast, our paper ballots.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Scott Cairns: first post, third post, fourth post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new 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.

B.H. Fairchild

B.H. Fairchild is an American poet who rose to prominence with the attention his third collection The Art of the Lathe (1998) received; it won several awards and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He demonstrates in that collection his preoccupation with craft, and his own history working alongside his father in a machine shop. Fairchild`s poems often deal with working-class people, and the sacramental quality of work. His two subsequent collections are Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003) which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Usher (2009).

It has been said that “Fairchild`s faith is not something proclaimed; it is something inhabited.” In an Image interview with Paul Mariani, Fairchild said that “being a Christian no longer seems to present a problem of belief for me, or at least not in the same way it once did... It`s simply who I am.”

The Deposition

-----------------------------------And one without a name
Lay clean and naked there, and gave commandments.
--------------------—Rilke, “Washing the Corpse” (trans. Jarrell)

Dust storm, we thought, a brown swarm
plugging the lungs, or a locust-cloud,
but this was a collapse, a slow sinking
to deeper brown, and deeper still, like the sky
seen from inside a well as we are lowered down,
and the air twisting and tearing at itself.

But it was done. And the body hung there
like a butchered thing, naked and alone
in a sudden hush among the ravaged air.
The ankles first—slender, blood-caked,
pale in the sullen dark, legs broken
below the knees, blue bruises smoldering
to black. And the spikes. We tugged iron
from human flesh that dangled like limbs
not fully hacked from trees, nudged
the cross beam from side to side until
the sign that mocked him broke loose.
It took all three of us. We shouldered the body
to the ground, yanked nails from wrists
more delicate, it seemed, than a young girl’s
but now swollen, gnarled, black as burnt twigs.
The body, so heavy for such a small man,
was a knot of muscle, a batch of cuts
and scratches from the scourging, and down
the right side a clotted line of blood,
the sour posca clogging his ragged beard,
the eyes exploded to a stare that shot
through all of us and still speaks in my dreams:
I know who you are.

------------------------So, we began to wash
the body, wrenching the arms, now stiff
and twisted, to his sides, unbending
the ruined legs and sponging off the dirt
of the city, sweat, urine, shit—all the body
gives—from the body, laying it out straight
on a sheet of linen rank with perfumes
so that we could cradle it, haul it
to the tomb. The wind shouted.
The foul air thickened. I reached over
to close the eyes. I know who you are.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca