How Bright It Is Poem Analysis

[Adimar Poynter]

Ihave seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the

pearl of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

I hope you all enjoy this beautiful poem by Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas. Thomas was an anglican priest, as well as a poet, but I think this piece is full of profound wisdom for everyone, regardless of creed.

These lines deliver to me the notion that these bright moments of grace are in fact moments where we are intensely present. These are the moments we are most alive, and when we feel most connected to life, the universe, and/or God. This is as relevant for prayer and meditation as it is for all the other instances I have mentioned where one might experience a moment of exhilarating and glorious connection to the universe.

Wiman's new essay collection, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, is an exploration of his faith and life in extreme crisis. Noting how cancer's ever-presence has challenged his faith in Christianity, Western philosophy and lyric poetry, Wiman has chosen to plumb his ambivalence (his bright abyss) about all three rather than simply cementing his beliefs.

Wiman's ambivalence finds its form and style in the title piece, "My Bright Abyss." Stitching individual journal entries together into a whole, positioning each to either extend or oppose neighboring passages, he explains:

"It is not that I am tired of poetic truth, or that I feel it to be somehow weaker or less than reason. The opposite is the case. Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often anomalous ... To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another. What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates. I crave, I suppose, the poetry and the prose of knowing."

But check out some of Wiman's other titles: "Sorrow's Flower"; "Dear Oblivion"; "God Is Not Beyond"; "Mortify Our Wolves." No doubt, the author's intense questioning and dense resolutions are challenging. He amplifies the daunting subject matter with his toggling among quotations from poets, theologians, novelists and philosophers in search of intelligence that will arouse readers (and himself) out of their habitual thinking on love, partnership, faith, feeling, language and "the ghost called God."

In several spots, the author's movements seem too swift and may leave readers stumbling in pursuit. Take "Hive of Nerves," where Wiman shifts rapidly along a chain of quotations from James Joyce's Ulysses to Osip Mandelstam's poem "Tristia" to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to his own poem "Commute I" as if demonstrating how our "collective ADHD," as he calls it, works. Wiman's attempting to explain that attaining consciousness requires simultaneously relaxation into and resistance to the anxieties that speedy contemporary life produces. Though he claims that "such effort deepens and complicates our initial response [to God and religion]," grasping the author's insight requires perusing these sentences many times.

Yes, the collection demands close attention and rereading, but, thankfully, the essays offer generous rewards too. For example, "Varieties of Quiet" calls Christians to revolutionize their worship by introducing poetry as liturgy, meditation in "focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals," and incorporating language that both negates and asserts God, which may be, Wiman explains, "not simply the only 'proper' means of addressing or invoking God, but the only efficacious one as well."

Addressing his young twin daughters near the collection's close, Wiman writes, "My loves, I will be with you, even if I am not with you." His faith in afterlife connection foreshadows twinned claims finalizing his meditations: "We cannot get beyond our lives until we eliminate all notions and expectations of a 'beyond'," and "In the end the very things that have led us to God are the things that we must sacrifice." These are, Wiman suggests, the beneficial revelations that readers gain in their struggling with his complex, paradoxical interpretations. As well, the theological, philosophical and poetic quotations placed throughout the collection, like the one from the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, direct readers toward these realizations.

In her poem, "God Works in a Mysterious Way," Brooks calls on God to "Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves, / Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves." Taking up My Bright Abyss, we assume a sovereignty ourselves, relaxing into and resisting Wiman's vision, savoring it and arguing with it, in thought and feeling.

Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martnez Ramrez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria. Their bodies lay lifeless on the river bank overgrown with riparian plants. The girl was still wrapped in her father's black shirt, a gesture of love, protection, and determination against the currents that ultimately overcame their bodies. But if the harrowing image became yet another banner of the border crisis, a crisis exacerbated by the current U.S. administration, it also reiterated the way brown and black Latinx bodies are seen in the American political imaginary: as alien subjects of tragedy, misfortune, and violence, washing up on this side of the Rio Grande. As the image went viral, the migrants' names were drowned for a second time in a sea of sensationalizing media. Their corpses were meant to humanize a crisis, but we remember the singular, graphic shot, not their names, their lives, the circumstances that carried them to the river's waters.

Ada Limn's poetry has often felt for me like a refuge, a place to find the restored humanity of Latinx bodies. She refuses to render gendered and racialized bodies disposable, expendable, victimized, merely wounded, or easily categorized. In her work, the body is fleshy and full of yearnings, mistakes, pain, joy, lust, memories, both personal and ancestral, idiosyncrasies, weirdness and wildness, grief and grace. Limn's body of poetry conveys a profound perception of the fleeting instants and grounding histories that make us who we are. Her poems are a celebration of the body alive, which, while finite and mortal, is never abject: "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying."4

As if in response to the many social constraints imposed on the racialized body and the limiting stereotypes predetermining an accented name, Limn at times fantasizes about taking language and her body back, articulating a more authentic, primal relationship to the self and the world around it. As she explores in the early poem "The Echo Sounder," at her most primal "she comes with a language restricted / by its own inability to name things / as she sees them."7. The poem goes on to contrast her innate questions and intuitive perceptions as a child to the things she learns through language as a grownup: "She understands now that bodies can swing / from trees and whole families can be / locked up, that people die the way fish do / starving sometimes, gutted and tortured."8 As an adult, knowing all she knows, she tries repeating language out loud long enough so that it loses its meaning and echoes back as strange senseless, animal-like sound. In doing so, she

The speaker thus fantasizes about existing in a world without words or representation, bottomless, in which we are not "echo sounders," not learning about the depths (and limits) of ourselves and others by means of socially reverberating projections and repetitions.

But names and identities, Limn knows, also bespeak heritage and honor. They carry the histories that make us. It is thus crucial that in the poem "The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual" there is not only rejection, but also remembrance. Halfway through the poem the speaker turns to a memory of her father, a teacher, who was told by a colleague that "his kind" were thieves. Refusing to silently weather this racism, the father steals the man's hubcaps and shows up at work "wearing a poncho" and offering to sell them back to him. Embodying a stereotype to expose and subvert it, the father reveals how ethnic paradigms can also be sources of pride, connection, solidarity, and resistance.

Limn's ties to her surname and ethnic inheritance are, by her own account, sinuous, layered, complex. Growing up, she had been told that her paternal grandfather was originally from San Juan de los Lagos, Mexico, and that he migrated to the United States in 1917 when his land was confiscated during the Mexican Revolution, a story that she too has retold in at least one interview.10 But in another essayistic account she writes that:

Her surname is thus a bearer of complicated, embodied histories, familial memories that morph as they migrate, crossing linguistic, geographic, and generational borders. Her own father was a teacher, and her (white, non-Hispanic) mother, an artist. Limn's parents divorced and both remarried when she was young, and, by her own account, she grew up in a lower middle-class household in Northern California. As she expressed it in an interview: "I was not raised in a bilingual family. My grandfather [ . . . ] worked hard to assimilate into U.S. culture, growing up in a foster family, and eventually graduating from college. I have always identified with Mexican culture, but like many of us, I am not only one thing. I'm many things. I'm Irish, and Scottish, and German too. Part lion. Part dragon."12 Certainly not all Latinx people have the privilege of being able to freely affiliate with or "waltz" between mixed ethnic heritages, but it is her experience, one which she explores with honesty and integrity.

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