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| Spence Reece |
The Road To Emmaus
by Spencer Reece
© 2014 Spencer
Reece
Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux
New York, New
York
Hardbound, $24
(tentative),124 page
Review by Zvi A.
Sesling
There are some
poets a reader discovers and is determined to read the rest of that poet’s work. This happened with The Road to Emmaus, Spencer Reece’s second offering to the poetic
world. The first book, A Clerk’s Tale, of which the title poem
was given a full page review in The New
Yorker proved to be an enthralling poem, in fact the whole book proved more
than interesting. However, the current
volume, due out in April 2014 from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux is one to be
recommended without hesitation.
As interesting as
his poems are, Reece himself is fascinating character. He was a salesman for
Brooks Brothers, clothing men in high priced apparel. A gay man, he later
became an Episcopalian priest. He teaches in Central America now. His poems are
reality based often depicting what he sees or experiences. Let’s look at “ICU”
Those mornings I traveled
north on I-91,
passing below the
basalt cliff of East Rock
where elms
discussed their genealogies,
I was a chaplain
at Hartford Hospital,
took the
Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,
learned I was an I drawn to Es.
In small group I
said, “I do not like it,
the way young
black men die in the ER,
shot,
unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,
their belongings
catalogued and unclaimed.”
In the neonatal
ICU, newborns, breathed,
blue,
spider-delicate in nests of tubes.
A Sunday of
themselves, their tissue purpled,
their eyelids the
film on old water in a well,
their faces
resigned in plastic attics,
their skin
mottled mildewed wallpaper.
It is correct to
love even at the wrong time.
On rounds, the
newborns eyed me, each one
like Orpheus in
his dark hallway, saying:
I knew I would find, I knew I would lose you.
Perhaps his
teaching experiences in central America resulted in the poem “Among
Schoolchildren” in which the following appears:
I had come to work in the orphanage of Villa Florencia.
Inside the ten-foot wall with barbed wire, behind the
mental
gate,
guards fingered
their pistols
like Bibles,
and seventy
orphaned girls politely greeted strident Christians.
One girl had been
found on a coconut truck.
She had lived on
coconut juice since birth,
had trouble
speaking, preferred not to be held.
Two sisters had
been left a street corner on a sheet of
cardboard;
their mother told
them to wait, then never came back.
Reece’s
descriptions leave little to the imagination. No surrealist, he realistic
verbiage brings it all to the immediate, the real. Yes, his sexual orientation
crops up. More importantly is his religious orientation which buttresses his
faith and his ability to see and deal with the difficulties of the lives of
others.
In his final
poem, “Hymn,” the last three lines may best sum up Reece’s poetry:
We each went our
separate ways
following where
we were being led.
Marie said: “Writ
it down, just as it happened.”
Reece has done
that in definitive fashion much to our good fortune.
_____________________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Publisher, Muddy River Books, Brookline, MA
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8
