In Jane Greer, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins find a worthy companion
Love Like a Conflagration: Poems by Jane Greer. Lambing Press, 2020. 102 pp., $15.95
The World as We Know It Is Falling Away: New Poems by Jane Greer. Lambing Press, 2022. 54 pp., $15.95
The biographical note on the back cover of The World as We Know It Is Falling Away says that “Jane Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal in 1981 and edited it until 1993. PPJ was a forum for poetry using rhyme and meter and was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement.” A comparable note at The North American Anglican website clarifies that although Greer “has had poetry published for forty years,” she took “some time off in the middle.” Perhaps because of that time off in the middle, I was unfamiliar with Greer’s poetry until now. I’m grateful for the introduction.
In “The Argument of his Book,” a sonnet in heroic couplets, the seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick catalogs the seemingly disparate things and themes that show up in the jointly published Hesperides and Noble Numbers. His list includes brooks, blossoms, birds, and bowers; Maypoles and hock-carts; love and whatever it is he means by “cleanly wantonness.” Acknowledging that he writes about “the court of Mab and . . . the fairy king” and of Hell, he nevertheless insists that he sings “(and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.” The poem tacitly—but emphatically—rejects any rigid distinction or ultimate separation between the bodily and the spiritual, between secular and sacred. And, depending on who you ask, Herrick’s conjoined collections succeed in making his case for the interrelatedness of all things.
Greer’s Conflagration achieves a similar whippy coherence: A listing of her themes and things would include apples and birds, desire and sin and pleasure, falling—into sin or in love or even “Falling Awake”)—but also redemption. The events in her poems occur in the chiaroscuro between darkness and light, between fidelity and adultery, between gain and loss, between judgment and mercy, and (as with Herrick) between heaven and hell.
The poem “Micha-el” opens the volume; the rest of the collection is arranged in three divisions: “At the Garden of Organic Delight,” “In the Pool at the Bourbon Orleans,” and “Bathsheba on the Third Day.” Greer’s title phrase, “love like a conflagration,” comes from “Micha-el” which, like Herrick’s “Argument,” frames and anticipates the collection as a whole.
This poem, which by itself is nearly worth the price of admission, accomplishes subtleties that require and deserve more space than available in a brief review (such as the echo of 1 Peter 1:12 in the seventh stanza). The speaker is Michael the Archangel, who in the Epistle of Jude and in the Apocalypse upholds God’s authority and enacts God’s judgment. Greer’s hyphen invites a pronunciation recalling the name’s Hebrew etymology: “Who is like God?” In Michael’s voice, the poem answers the question: No one is like God. God is the one whom “you underestimate at your own peril / Whom we [angels] have come from, / Whom we are acting for” in judgment. Paradoxically, although “it’s too late now: / suddenly it’s too late to ask for mercy,” the judgment which Michael proclaims arrives as a devastating mercy nevertheless: “Mercy is what you’ll get—His wide-armed mercy— / but you won’t like it.”
The question embedded in Michael’s name thus suggests that we human sinners have failed to know God. But, Michael says, “He knows you deeply, yet still encumbers your black hearts with blessings.” This God “breathed you / out of the mud and on your way to Heaven,” which could have been “yours for the asking— // but you were too intent on what you’d crawled from,” too interested in mud to desire heaven. In consequence, “Love like a conflagration shall be yours now . . . love like an avalanche” as “God With Us, / Emmanu-el, comes bearing yet more mercy, but you won’t like it.” If this is devotional poetry—and it is—then it’s the kind of devotion evinced by Donne’s holy sonnets or Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets.”
Desire, in both negative and positive kinds, informs many of the poems in the collection. The first subsection and its first poem share the title “At the Garden of Organic Delight.” In nine vivid lines the poem presents “young men” hawking their scented soaps in order to entice the hearer to “step inside.” The hearer, apparently a young woman, admits that “suddenly, stepping inside is what / I desire, more than anything, to do.” Evocations in “Micha-el” of the creation of human beings and our fall into sin determine our reading of this shorter poem. The garden of organic delight is a type of the archetypal Eden, just as every temptation re-enacts the serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve.
Similar resonances permeate the subsection. Even while lamenting the wages of sin, for example, “The Adulterer in Hell” recalls a time when “We would yield, / but slowly, make delicious Death / court us even as we caught our breath.” “The Adulterer in Hell” might be read as a sequel to an earlier poem, “The Romantic,” in which a woman in a bland marriage fantasizes about an affair with a lover she hasn’t yet encountered. The speaker in “At the Center of the Universe” understands herself, Augustine-like, as “more and more restive with desire,” while the naive character pictured briefly in “Her Green Desire” experiences desire as simultaneously “thorn and thicket” and “wet green Paradise,” twisted echo of irrecoverable Eden. “Lines on a Plain Brown Wrapper” recognizes that “Sin longs to give what we’ve denied / ourselves” and “leads us in easy stages,” though it also “makes some bones about its wages.” The last line recalls that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), but suggests also that sin numbs our awareness of this debt. “After the Fall” concretizes the devastating sound of “a single apple dropped on solid ground,” a sound which coincides with a “sick rushing knowledge / that I had done irreparable damage.” The fall is also the focus of “In the Beginning,” the first poem in Bathsheba on the Third Day.
Despite Greer’s sensitivity to human fallenness, the collection as a whole opens with notes of light and hope. The speaker of “In the Pool at the Bourbon Orleans,” observing a beach ball floating “trapped, untroubled” on the pool’s surface, encourages herself to “Hold in your mind the glad captivity, the lavish nonchalance” of the beach ball, trusting that what seems to be purposeless movement will nevertheless turn out to be “altogether pleasing to the Lord.” This conclusion reminds me of the lovely final lines of Richard Wilbur’s “Elsewhere,” in which “the Lord’s delighting mind . . . ponders” things outside our scope.
Near the end of the book, in the “Catechism” section of “Found Poem,” the speaker recalls that “By grace God grants / our sins’ forgiveness, stills our wild wants, / our hungers’ bedlam, brims full our common eye, / [and] nurtures our wills.” The poem concludes by acknowledging that, though words may fail, “there are hints of Heaven here / [that] dark cannot cover, wind cannot tear.”
In the more recent collection, World, Greer develops similar tensions, though her style in this volume is somewhat sparser and more personal than her style in Conflagration. Poems such as “The Light as Thick as Clover Honey” and “Thirty Years’ Creeper War” and “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” convincingly render what seem to be homey personal memories. “Four Perfect Figs” recalls a small act of generous love, recognizing in the gift of the figs an answer to the world’s brokenness: “The solid facts of the world are war, / pestilence, fear, and war, / yet no less solid is the fact / of perfect figs laid there.” “I Lived in Paradise” echoes Conflagration’s preoccupation with human fallenness but expresses the effects in the first person. Even more than “Micha-el,” “Wreck and Restore Me” imagines God’s demolishing power in an experience like that of Donne’s speaker in “Batter My Heart”: “Demolish and renovate me, Lord. / Wreck and restore me. // Habit by habit, flaw by flaw, / break and mend me under love’s law” (Greer’s italics).
The speaker of these poems recognizes herself as a participant in the communion of saints, imaginatively empathizing with St. Paul (in “Thorn”), questioning St. Augustine (in “Non Confessio”), remembering Mary of Egypt (in “Mary of Egypt Has a Dream”), agonizing with King David in “He Paces,” and so on. Near the end of the volume, one of these, “Catherine of Siena to Her Confessor,” remembers “the bridge” of Christ’s body, “Most Holy Absurdity,” as the divine provision for human salvation.
The next poem, “Two Men in White Address Them,” might be read as an answer to Conflagration’s “Micha-el.” The two men are those, presumably angels, who appear to the disciples after Jesus’s ascension in Acts 1:10-11. Like “Micha-el,” the poem anticipates Christ’s return, as well as commenting on the limits of human understanding, but “Two Men” is gentler; the men conclude, “We laugh at you, / but mean it kindly. If you only knew.”
“First Elegy” is something of an exception in this volume. In this poem Greer uses a longer line, and the poem itself is longer than any other in the collection. Yet the tension the poem develops between gratitude and despair, between the eternal life we hope for and the intrusive mortality that confronts us in the death of a loved one—that tension entirely coheres with the collection as a whole. The long, frequently enjambed lines effectively capture the tumult of emotion brought on by a diagnosis of cancer: “Death phoned and pretended to be my mother but I knew better / when she said she’d found a lump, it was small, I shouldn’t worry, / it was very small, all the doctors felt she’d found it early, / Such careful words out of all the possible words she could utter.” The poem expresses faith, but with it the doubt and anger that accompany loss anyway: “And this sounds melodramatic and more than a little morbid / but it’s the hard truth, we resent what happened to her body, / resurrection or not, to the sudden end it was lithe and healthy, / we want it back joking, that was Mother, not God forbid // this gray unnatural being in Mother’s clothes we’ve found.” As in Greer’s shorter poems, the natural, occasionally allusive, and always precise diction of “First Elegy” displays the deftness of a master.
I haven’t left much space to discuss Greer’s formalism. Those who, like me, appreciate rhyme and meter, will be impressed by her versatile and usually unobtrusive appropriation of form. The lines I have just quoted from “First Elegy” are good examples. It’s possible to read the poem without paying much attention to form, but Greer’s four-line stanzas and well-chosen rhymes (including near-rhyme) discipline, even as they allow, the poem’s cascading emotion. Similar excellences appear throughout both collections.
I’ve also neglected Greer’s humor, which supplies a lovely counterpoint to her darker poems. The playful self-mockery of “Trending” is delightful, but my favorite among these lighter poems is “On Nearing Our Thirty-fifth Anniversary” (in Conflagration), in which the married couple “From opposite ends of the couch . . . text each other jokes / and outrageous political gaffes / we’ve found.” This poem, also, is about desire—for life, for love, for beauty: “We each desire / the same reward for our craft: a head thrown back, a snort, / and, more than anything else— / and every time—that look. . . .”
William Tate teaches English at Covenant College.