Syntaxes of the Spirit: On For the Fire from the Straw by Heidi Lynn Nilsson

Kingston, RI: Barrow Street, 2017. 81 pages. $16.95.

Legend has it that on his deathbed Thomas Aquinas received a mystical vision so illuminating, so profound that it made all his systematic theology—the whole and summation of his life’s work—seem “as straw.” What divine syntaxes could have come to him in that hour, dismantling and reconstructing the medieval architecture of his mind? What divine music?

It’s into this space of the awed, arrested, and searching soul that Heidi Lynn Nilsson’s latest poetry collection, For the Fire from the Straw, invites us. A scan of its reverent invocations—of Jesus and Paul, of Merton and King, of Rumi and the Buddha—reminds us that we still inhabit a cosmos of spiritual authority as androcentric as the ancient, medieval, and modern. But from the opening lines, Nilsson’s command of those idioms is so spellcasting that we know, and trust, that we’re in the hands of one who can fashion new worlds of meaning from traditions that can seem archaic, clichéd, calcified, suffocating, and even excruciating. An Anne Hutchinson. A Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Marilynne Robinson. There’s more than a little Calvin in tight, self-deprecating lines like these, musing on the message of neighboring Jehovah’s Witnesses: “my odds / of pleasing a hygiene hooked deity? / Virus-sized.” But Calvin never indulged in irony, nor sensuality and play, the way Nilsson does (not that he let on, anyway). So while she exhibits all the existential anguish, and tortured elegance, of a good Puritan in a poem like “My Least Skirtable Deficiency” (“For the life / whose loss is less / articulate than its progress— / and for the pale, weightless / sorrow that enters, / scentlike—I should have / incessantly prayed”), the point is never to shove us sinners, trembling and weak, into the hands of angry God.

Indeed, Nilsson’s epistles and confessions enact a kind of feminist subversion of religious convention: not as ribald as Anne Lamott, nor as radical as Mary Daly, but subversion nonetheless. Perhaps inhabited by the spirit of Woolf, she authors this about Genesis:

While he wrote a woman
with his rib bone,

God closed Adam’s eyes.
I like to work alone.

A man might take my pain.
A man might plagiarize.

Nilsson seeks grace and peace as passionately as Paul and disowns dualisms as mercilessly as Augustine, but with a deeper trust of the physical than either could muster. She allows herself to say boldly and heterodoxically with Rumi, “The way you make love is the way God will be with you.” And in the face of spiritual darkness, there is more sorrow and awe than terror; before the embodied Imago Dei there is more wonder than shame. Yet each knowing affirmation is devoid of sentimentality, as we see in “The Winter Indefinite, in Which We Dwell”:

Against the tongue, the ice, loafing, lessens.
Against the skin, the tongue, slow.
The home, small, taut, reticent
against the snow.

The voices rest in the necks
like bedposts. The bodies
colorless against the bed.
Against the wanting, the only
window here. Against the head.

Against the limb that lingers by the gut.
Against the mouth that’s trusting, hunter, hushed.
Against the breast that steadies when
it’s crushed—
lie, lie
again, again.

A disarming irreverence offers us further assurance that we’re in good hands, even if we’re headed for minefields. The epigraph for the third of the collection’s five sections—which comprises ten brief confessions, numbered Roman and commandment-like on “two stone tablets” (we are told)—invokes not Moses but the slick evangelical celebrity Andy Stanley, and they include this “confession of sexual expression” from the speaker: “I feel as if I’m trying to talk / to the dental hygienist whose hands / are in my mouth.” And this “confession of religious desire”: “Quite sure I covet my neighbor’s house, / her manservants, maidservants, / absolutely her ass.”

For all its play (Jimmy Buffett and Miley Cyrus—contemporary tricksters, apparitions, and guides—offer an occasional verse), For the Fire from the Straw vocalizes mostly in a minor key, punctuated by lamentations of distance. Two poems in a more postmodern mood and voice conjure earnest exchanges across spiritual divides, one with an atheist and the other with an interlocutor who is “spiritual but not religious.” In the latter (“On the Path to Form from Fancy”), the speaker offers to

. . . lean in and listen,
so there would be less distance

between what you said
and what I feel.

Show me what you know of love
that’s both divine and real,

and I won’t deny it,
although your mind

makes it fire
and mine straw.

And in “An Epistle for My Friend the Atheist from Her Friend the Christian,” she offers her testimony about Jesus meekly, as tender truce: “I love the story of a man / who walked the earth sadly / because he loved everyone.”

In the end, For the Fire from the Straw seems to know it’s speaking a language, and making music, that fewer and fewer have ears to hear. But it holds out the hope that we can remain bonded to each other, and bear one another’s burdens, in our agonized humanity and perhaps in the staggered, defiant questions of Ecclesiastes, Hagar, or Job. In “Stray,” the terrorized speaker asks of modern war:

        And what
department does airborne radioactive dust
        most offend? The eyes? The throat? The lung? And what
do living bodies look like in a fire?
        Loaves of bread settling? Do they curl in like a fetus?

The lines are fractured, uneven and unjustifiable, evoking a fallen world whose redemption may ultimately depend—precariously, tragically—on “the grace of men.”