Canadian poet Richard Osler’s new poetry volume, What Holiness Can I Bring? , is shadowed by death. Several poems express his grief over the death of a close friend. Take these lines from “Poet and Chair”:
This absence, no absence. This weight:
a thousand elephants. Try
standing them on a chair. No way
to measure the weight of what happened
at five in the afternoon.
Those elephants “standing…on a chair”: what a powerful image for grief’s heaviness.
Or the heaviness of darkness and night in “Poet and the Beloved”:
I cup my hands around the ear
of morning and say: he is gone. And I hear
nothing back. Darkness falls and I cup them
around the ear of night and night answers back:
I am midwife to light. Choose to believe me or not.
I whisper back: it is not light I seek but his
face, his large hands, his barrel chest.
Night’s silence is a blade’s impossible
kindness, carving an emptiness as womb
or sorrow and grief. Beloveds deceased.
In that blade “carving emptiness” we actually feel the sharpness of grief’s pain.
While Osler was in the midst of writing the poems that became this book, he learned that his own death was near: he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, naturally, he began composing poems on this diagnosis and its implications. “Living with Stage Four” ponders the immediate implications of what will be “less” and what “more”:
Less
of this body weighing
down this earth. Less
footsteps in a day – More
of seeing the world
lying flat on a bed
or propped up by pillows.
More window to look
through – more distancing
between the world and me.
Then in “The Poet and the Face of Death,” he takes our common idiom of “facing danger” or “facing hardship” and plays with it:
Give death a face a voice directed me.
My own face now wise with the news
of death inside of me. If I walk
to the mirror and look is it me I see
or death now come out from hiding
inside my face?
The book’s penultimate poem, “Always,” meditates on the “dying in living” which is cancer. It also contains the book’s title line. Here’s the whole poem (all in italics):
this dying in living but not so
obvious as it is now with the too much
of cancer, this not so silent marauder
making its way, having its way,
inside me. And me, seemingly defenseless
against it. And I will not rail or shout
against it. I will not call it this autumn
or maybe already winter robbing me
of spring or summer. I will not call
memory a wound, a reminder of when
death was more a curiosity, a place
in a country far away. Now, this reality
I am called to visit. But what gift, what
holiness will I bring. What bright diamond
from this darkness, not a darkness,
if I choose to tell death, clearly, my name?
Despite the depth of pain evoked in this poem, I enjoy the irony of its repeated “I will not call”—because in these lines Osler actually is calling (naming) these things.
I’m interested, too, in the “bright diamond” in the midst of “this darkness.” It’s a spiritual vision: the mystery of the possibility of light within the deepest gloom.
In fact, there’s a spirituality hovering within and around many of the book’s poems. Take this “prayer” in “Poet and Nightingale”: “A Nightingale’s lift into song, could it hold / grief’s weight in a prayer for a dead friend?” Or the “blessings” and “faith” in “Hands of a Poet”:
I know the ruin that hands can make
of many blessed things and the blessings
they can make of many ruined things.
And I know the faith of a poet
who believes he can make words found
within an invisible source.
Imagine a poet’s hands might unwrap
some of the ninety-nine
names for God.
Finding words “within an invisible source”: what a marvelous image for poetry’s miracle. And the poet’s hands “unwrapping” some of God’s ninety-nine names: another remarkable image for poetry’s relation to the spirit.
In fact, the book’s brief final poem, “Afternoon Prayer,” lifts the poet—and us, the readers—up to the divine:
for me
in whisper, wind’s almost held breath,
and whistle, a hidden bird’s question.
All this
for me to rise
to God’s-held sky.
Clearly for Richard Osler, poetry is a spiritual calling. In fact, he ends the book’s Afterword this way:
“If given enough time what would you like to do or create before you die?
What Holiness Can I Bring? is an answer, and may very well be my last collection of poems. May you find your own synchronicities, your own divine connections, the beauty of the poet/priest as conduit for your own connection to spirit, and your own beloved lives within.”
To which I say, Amen. And a final (yes, heartbreakingly final) note: Richard Osler died on October 26.
Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.
