Resin: Poems

by Geri Doran

Book Overview

In poems of quiet force, Geri Doran maps the fragility of human connection and the irreducible fact of grief. From the communal ruptures of Chechnya and Rwanda to the personal dislocations that attend great loss, Resin weighs frailty against responsibility, damage against the desires of the heart. For the poet, a factory fire in late-nineteenth-century Portland becomes a tool for precise knowing: The phases of wood are a means / of dead reckoning:...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807130761
• ISBN13: 9780807130766
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Unnameable Holy

Faith is unilaterally said to be a comfort; submission is thought to be the fruit of oppression. Faith has become an act of the torpid, it is common to hear "I take it on faith" to mean -and perhaps has always meant- "I take it without consideration", whereas submission has been relegated to a barbaric age of oppression, but what Geri Doran has done, and that rather courageously, is to return us to the wild faith of the primeval era, to the radical nature of submission, and to remind us of the true dread of religion. The fainthearted have already logged their complaints about this book and its tendency to "God-talk", but the mistake comes in thinking that faith is purely the act of the weak willed, those at wit's end, when true faith is dangerous and true gods undomesticated. That religion is careful and easy is early and often challenged. In the second poem, where the first has set the landscape as the soul, the dimness of Israel's sight (quoting Genesis 48:10) becomes our model for faith as he calls himself a daylily nearing dusk. A daylily's breathlike glory is perfectly emblematic of man's life, here used for the recklessness of faith, for faith, says St. Paul, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" and as G. K. Chesterton understands these Christian virtues, "Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless." And this is necessary "or it is no virtue at all". Israel in the poem looks at the world and says: "Pigsty, lilyfield -what difference/ to an old man losing sight?" The fourth poem, "Hurry the Iowa Cornfields", reminds us that faith is not a series of answers, but a pattern for finding answers, a questing. "Twice now in the declining light/ I've carried my prayer to the field." This prayer midpoem is refused, but in the silence which follows a response is made: I come at dusk to stand in the rows rummaging in the inadequate light for gold silk turned to brown, for ripeness, answering. The answer comes out of the abundance of the earth, though it is not the sort of answer that would satisfy "the calculous of logic", as Ms. Doran elsewhere calls it. This imprecise impression is repeated in "Dusk in the Palm of the Lord" where she says: "God in the presence or absence of love./ I forget which grace is." and her prayer is repeated "Do not forget me at dusk." This terrain is full of wilderness, darkness, and fire, but it is not resigned solipsism, as she says "we passed/ from knowing to unknowing and back" (The Cedar of Lebanon). Neither is it all tension; truth comes in epiphanies, blue plums, potatoes, and the "persuasive hue" of Madrona trees. She speaks carelessly about her god, he is floundering, the "Dirty One", the wild, silent, and uncontrollable. As daring as she is in her belief it is no wonder, in our temerity, that we shy from this sort of faith, gravitating to beliefs that suit us, that placate us. Rather than faith we prefer the sat