Spencer Reece’s third book of poetry is his first in ten years. This new collection’s title, Acts, suggests a rough continuity with 2014’s The Road to Emmaus, especially since both allude to a single author, Luke. And like the Luke-Acts sequence, Reece’s second and third books form two distinct parts of a single, formally unified work.
With The Road to Emmaus, Reece left behind the precise imagery and tight lines that had marked his debut, The Clerk’s Tale (2004). We can see this shift—at once tonal and thematic—by comparing, almost at random, the opening of two poems. First, from “Midnight,” in The Clerk’s Tale:
Pine trees stir in a chorus of darkness.
The lake taps the shore as if to tell me something.
A light rain increases the abstractions, all edges blur.
Dark tilled fields stretch for miles.
The Midwest settles into my chest.
Now, the first five lines of the title poem from The Road to Emmaus:
The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew.
I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan,
in her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House,
right on South Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida,
and began my story—
Notice how the lyric compression of The Clerk’s Tale gave way, in The Road to Emmaus, to a looser, narrative mode. By the latter book, Reece had largely dispensed with the harsh accents of lines like “Dark tilled fields stretch for miles.” Instead, he prioritized accuracy, even when it came at rhythm’s expense: “right on South Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida.”
This Emmaus emphasis on narrative and personal detail—as well as its concomitant fealty to an almost casual poetics—carries over explicitly to Reece’s newest poems. Of Acts’ roughly one-hundred pages, a full third form an epistolary sequence, “Letters from Spain.” At once a catalog of daily life in Madrid (where Reece, an Episcopal priest, worked for the Spanish bishop) and an account of the poet’s time there, “Letters” attempts to formally hold together both image and story, lyric insight and narrative arc.
From preaching mishaps to anecdotes about parishioners to meta-commentary on the genre of the epistle (“Letters started in the Book of Acts. / Luke wrote to Theophilus in his dusty office, / much like mine…”), the sequence doesn’t strive for comprehension so much as candor. “Last year the Bishop / lost the sight in one eye, a stroke,” writes Reece in one section. He continues: “I rotate around / the glaucous unworkable dead orb like a clock, / keeping his many confidences.”
These lines—incisive yet understated—show Reece at his lyrical best. Like a surgeon, he plucks the “unworkable” eye out of the detritus of daily events and shows it to us. But no sooner does the poem offer this uncanny image than it turns, immediately, back to the facts of daily life: the bishop has “put on weight,” the line finishes, “has gout.”
As even these strong lines suggest, Reece’s commitment to candor walks a constant tightrope between the insightful and the inane. In “Reyes,” for example, Reece writes this about the bishop’s pet birds:
Often the birds get stolen. He looks sad then.
Only I see this. Maybe his elegant wife sees it.
We rarely see her, she’s busy. And more beautiful
than us. They have no children, only two Yorkies
Named Honey and Sugar: a kind of future.
More trite than quotidian, these lines falter not only because of the false profundity of that final phrase (“a kind of future”) but also because of the limp monotony of their music. Helen Vendler once described the verse of the Roman poet Horace as being sustained by the pressure of “force against counterforce”—what Randall Jarrell understood as the dialectical tension that motivates a poem’s structure. Too often in “Letters”—and, frankly, in Acts—we encounter entire passages that lack anything like such productive contrapuntal tension.
Despite the uneven quality of the long “Letters” sequence, Acts does contain moments of striking language and real insight. In both The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus, the strongest poems were frequently short theological lyrics. This is true in Acts, as well. In the opening poem, “San Sebastián,” Reece views the titular Spanish seaside town through the theological lens of the Christian martyr whose name it bears— and who has long been understood as a devotional figure for male homoerotic desire.
The poem opens with the cry of pure song: “¡Ay, ay, ay! // Still singing in my cell.” Like St. Paul and Silas, this imprisoned speaker has turned to song—and yet, “still,” no earthquake has shaken the prison’s foundations. First aligned with St. Paul, the speaker transforms into St. Sebastian in the third stanza: “My torso swells— / a hotel.” Lines later, he confesses the futility of the Sebastian typos: “Martyrdom bores me.” As if building to a slow simmer, these early stanzas proceed by way of indirection and fragmentation, until a single rhetorical question sets the entire poem boiling:
Will I be saved?
Yes, Goddammit,
I will be saved. Pitch your vile tracts.
Peninsula, tilt your goblets.
I measure God through my acts.
The theological provocation of these lines speaks to their success as poetry. Here, Reece moves seamlessly from the colloquial (“Yes, Goddammit”) to the apostrophic: “Peninsula, tilt your goblets.” The result is a line as concise as it is jarring: “I measure God through my acts.” As if flipping God’s rhetoric in the Book of Job on its head (“Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest?”), this lyric-“I” transfigures his personal experience into a theological claim. As readers, we might demur or consent—but we’re listening.
As in “San Sebastián,” the strongest poems in Acts bring together the personal and the theological into a “workable relation,” to borrow a phrase from James Merrill. In “Siesta,” Reece’s short, unpunctuated lines sketch the contours of a Spanish afternoon. “People not mine / what is it we can hear,” the poem asks in the opening lines, before offering, by way of answer, an impressionistic litany of images.
Too long to quote in full, “Siesta” avoids the tendency to overstatement—even to melodrama—that plagues many of the weaker parts of Acts. Instead, Reece trusts his eyes and ears: “the ex-monk clips / his lime tree just so” as “Portugal lies exposed / on her soft cheap cot / passive docile blue / next to my proud Spain / the bull of Europe.” At once homely and international, these lines have faith in the reader as much as they do their own formal integrity. When the final line’s confession arrives—“nothing here is mine”—it comes as a gesture of Christian humilitas, not hyperbole.
Acts is far from a perfect book. But in poems like “Siesta” and “San Sebastián”—as well as “Stille Nacht,” “Little Compton Psalm,” and Reece’s beautiful translation of Luis Cernuda, “Pilgrim”—Reece fashions lyrics that are as theologically fecund as they are rich with the symbiotic play of image and sound.
In the book’s final poem, “María Magdalena,” we find a partner to the opening poem, “San Sebastián.” Like that first lyric, the diction is sparse and the music sharp. “I kept vigil,” the poem begins, “Preferred shadows.” At the poem’s end, the speaker meditates explicitly on many of the central concerns of Acts. The final lines read:
My country? Did I have a country?
¿Mi país? ¿Tuve un país?
Stupid to bank on belonging,
I always knew that. I belonged to the Lord.
People laughed when I said that.
I no longer cared.
When my nailed human was free,
I left.
Reading these confident lines for the first time, I found myself wishing that more of Acts proceeded in this particular voice. When he writes like this, Spencer Reece is one of our most profound theological poets. In whatever poems follow Acts, I’ll be hoping for the expansion of this precise and melodic lyric style. I only hope we won’t have to wait another decade for it.
Acts
Poems
Spencer Reece
Farrar, Straus and Giroux $27 | 108 pp.
