Heart and Soul Poems by Carolyn Grassi Foreword by Ron Hansen:
Carolyn Grassi's Heart and Soul is fascinating in its fluent and affecting blend of memoir and poetry, reminiscence and sheer invention, loss, grief and homage. Adopting a persona at times, or imitating a seminal influence on her writing at other junctures, she has created a quilt of memories and reflections on a life's education-- the journey we all hope to make from becoming to being, or from acting as disciples to representing ourselves and our art as apostles.
The girl who attended a Catholic parish in Flatbush Brooklyn, who taught city kids to swim in a Catskill camp, who played Elvis tunes on her trumpet as she dreamed of a boy, surprises us by entering the Maryknoll Novitiate in Ossining, New York: "No t.v., / radio, newspapers or phone use. Only / visits from family twice a year. Letters / limited to once a week, none during Lent / and Advent." The life is hard enough that it is fitting that the formidable Mistress of Novices "loomed in my mind as a Marine / sergeant might for recruits," and yet Carolyn discovers that Sister Miriam was "a passionate / nature lover, a fine painter and possessed / an adventurous spirit . . ."
She likens that cloister experience to the fretful friendship between Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges, to the passionate but impossible love of Søren Kierkegaard for his Regina, to the self-abnegation of Thérèse of Lisieux, the enclosure and pining of Saint Clare for Francis of Assisi. And she's aware of what "on the other hand" she sees in a Jesuit theologian, a specialist on the sacrament of marriage, who one Easter leaves his religious order and his university job because, finally, "Love is making a personal appeal. Indecision's a thorn / in your side."
A sequence of poems describes the potent effect that the tortured fifteenth century Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz has on Teresa of Avila, whom Carolyn imagines seeks his spiritual direction. And she surprises us again with a giant leap in years and locale to California, now a mother of two sons and married to a former Maryknoll priest.
The fraught conditions of friendship float through the poems focusing in the next remarkable sequence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, the former famous, though for me the more minor poet, and hovered over by the three women in his house, while Coleridge is lonely, rejected, and seemingly a failure in the estimation of the literary
world, yet secretly pined for by Wordsworth's sister Dorothy .
And there are more intriguing poems in this soulful collection: a fairy tale version of the Annunciation that has been praised by John Ashbery, miniature meditations on Donatello's bas relief of Christ in the Victoria & Albert Museum, travel sketches from Milan, Versailles, and Mont Saint-Michel, and a poignant poem set in California's Point Reyes seashore in which she imagines her late mother present. That poem ends with the hymn "Come, Holy Spirit," an image evoked in a heron's flight across San Francisco Bay.
Joseph Grassi, Carolyn's husband, Biblical Professor at Santa Clara University, declined in health and passed away while some of these poems were being composed, and his gentle, genial presence is felt in her memories and revisions, particularly in the moving closing section "Sanctuary."
Carolyn's religious faith animates the poems in this collection. She's said of her work that "I wish for readers to feel, whatever struggles they go through in life, the Source of our being shall never abandon us on the journey." That Source is very present here. Written informally, in an intimate, conversational style, it nevertheless is a book full of wisdom, substance, sensual attentiveness and, yes Heart and Soul. / Among Ron Hansen's novels: Desperadoes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (a film), Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, finalist for a National Book Award.
