Nick Ripatrazone appreciates a new God-filled collection of poetry by a writer who is both catholic and Catholic.
I first encountered a poem from Butterfly Nebula, the new collection by Laura Reece Hogan, in Scientific American. Founded in 1845, the august publication is not known for its religious content. Yet Hogan, a lay Carmelite who lives in California, appeared in a recent issue with her poem “Lyrebird”.
The poem is not directly spiritual. The narrator speaks of the lyrebird, who mimics the love songs of other birds. The poem, though, seeks to undermine its own proposed meaning and purpose. “This poem wanted to rhapsodise about / the love song of the superb // lyrebird;” the poem “ached // to swoon at the skill and ardour / laid at her passerine feet.” Yet the male lyrebird eternally deceives – even going so far as to trick females that if they leave his presence, they will be attacked. The male then “covers // her eyes with a hood of his beating wings”.
Hogan’s jocular style in “Lyrebird” continues within Butterfly Nebula as a whole, yet is also paired with sentimental and sensitive moments. I posit that such deft pivots are endemic to Catholic writing; we find them in the work of Graham Greene, James Joyce, Franz Wright, JF Powers and so many others. Hogan’s synthesis of the comic and contemplative, though, is uniquely her own, and Butterfly Nebula is the full arrival of a notable voice in Catholic poetry.
One of Hogan’s front epigraphs for the book is Isaiah 62:2: “You shall be called by a new name, / pronounced by the mouth of the Lord.” The first poem, “In Which I Pray for Stars”, likewise begins “Remember me, Lord”. It is a phrase that encapsulates the collection: ardent speakers who wish to affirm the wondrous nature of the world and the divinity of creation. Her subjects are expansive: oceans, space, matter, gravity and “the unseeable fault lines / in the soul.”
Hogan has an omnivorous mind, truly both catholic and Catholic in attention. In the poem “Heart Nebula” she writes of how “The human heart, tiny cradle of light, holds at its / core these stars”. Her narration at first seems to vacillate between the cosmos and bodies, before ultimately unifying them: “It will bloom out and / lead you into fervent spilling over into the galaxy, / expanding if you let it.”
Hogan’s work exists in a tradition of poems speaking to the Beloved. In “Coalsack Nebula” she writes in direct address: “I scrabble the seam of your silence. You blot the belly // of earth, hollow the cosmos; you ink the endless empty / patches, you sharpen my unseeing eyes so I slip // the stars.” Much like the charged verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hogan’s dense syntax – arriving with the breathlessness of asyndeton – suggests a mind so attuned to wonders that it rattles with awe.
This is a God-teemed book. Quotations from scripture abound: Ezekiel, Matthew, Luke, Song of Songs, Ephesians and Psalms. Hogan is well-read, and well-contemplated.
The few prose poems in the book are exquisite, surprising prayers. In “Holy Saturday” she writes: “Lord, you know every alleyway and porch of my heart, the dirt paths, secret passages.” Later, she continues: “In some sleight of hand you hull the missing, make visible the latent.”
Hogan’s pivot to prose poetry is not surprising, as she has also established herself elsewhere as a talented essayist. In one piece, “Dark Super Bloom”, she begins by affirming “Here in Southern California we do not like to admit we live in a desert.” Wildfires catch them by surprise. Yet Hogan writes of a recent wet winter that “converted into a spring super bloom”, which brought a dizzying migration of Painted Lady butterflies. She ponders the resulting paradox: “On the one hand, it seemed that everyone in Los Angeles stopped and stared at the beauty flitting by; there was a sense of the miraculous in this plentiful torrent of butterflies after the drought, the fires, the winter. Yet like any miracle, how much aridity and ash, how many floods and mudslides made way for the abundance of bloom and wings?”
As a Catholic, Hogan sees “this super bloom of Painted Ladies, born of darkness and leading into darkness, points to a path of utter unknowing” – a version of the apophatic theology of via negativa. She considers St Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song of Songs – specifically, his observation of Moses moving into “the cloud where God was” in Exodus – as a useful demonstration of our “experience of increasing darkness in the approach to God”. In a similar way, she ponders how Painted Lady butterflies find their way; those “with access to the sun can orient themselves to the north”. Hogan notes that although the sun “provides the bearing”, their “resulting path is uncharted and mysterious”. The journey is fraught.
She builds her perceptive essay to a deft conclusion: like those butterflies, “we keep following the terrain, rustic or urban, rough or smooth, dull or exciting, alone or accompanied. The orienting drop of sunshine throbs within, urging us forward on a sure path through the darkness.”
I thought of this paradox again at the end of Hogan’s poem about an aspen in Utah’s Fishlake Forest: “Eighty thousand years old, the roots twine in one long embrace, thread and knot through earth, through centuries, the constant story unfolding in my heart, in your heart, in the interlocked heartbeat of every tender sapling breaking the surface.” All of creation is linked.
Perhaps, re-formulating Hopkins, the world is united with the grandeur of God.
Butterfly Nebula by Laura Reece Hogan (The Backwaters Press)
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