By Jonathan Geltner

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 

So says Jesus in the Gospel of John. It is a line that occurs to me often when I consider the influence of religious ideas—in this case, Christian—on a writer’s ability to engage with the fullness of life. That is a vague phrase, I realize: fullness of life. Perhaps it would be helpful to say what gets in the way of fullness of life.  

There are two major obstacles, in my view. One is material: the virtual world we have constructed and inhabit through screens is by its nature a thing set apart from real life. The more time a writer spends immersed in that world, the less she is able to observe, reflect upon, and move bodily through the real world, the given world of nature and human society as it is experienced face-to-face. The second obstacle is mental: the temptation to delude ourselves, to live in a fantasy of who we are, pretending to believe and feel what we think we ought to believe and feel or want to believe and feel in order to secure membership in a particular tribe. 

Now, J. C. Scharl’s Ponds, her debut collection of lyric poetry (she has already published a verse play, the first of a trilogy), impressed me immediately as a testament to the fullness of life. The poetry triumphs over those two obstacles. It sounds simple, observing and reflecting upon the given world, but it is surprisingly hard to do, requiring both inward and outward attention. Here is the poem “Spring Evening,” a consummate instance of this basic and essential task of lyric: 

                    There are evenings braced
                    by light like pillars,
                    when flecks of time
                    hang in the air
                    like dust, suspended.
                    This is one of them.  

                    Even the breeze
                    is its own calm.
                    The unending ripples
                    on the pond
                    become, by repetition,
                    a calm beyond stillness. 

                    This, I think, may be
                    how the world ends:
                    in a moment
                    that simply stays,
                    trembling in place
                    like an apple blossom,
                    but forever. 

There is artistry here, concealed in an apparently free verse. We have allusion: I think it is impossible to read “how the world ends” without thinking of T. S. Eliot’s “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” in “The Hollow Men.” Invoking that poem brings a certain atmosphere to this one, not to dominate it but to color it with the faint possibility of a path not taken, a thought and feeling that tempts but is not finally adopted.  

The final line of the first stanza, the complete sentence “This is one of them,” exercises another classic trope of lyric by capitalizing on the grammatical ambiguity of the pronoun. The “this” probably should refer to the evening that the poem describes. But a secondary possibility is that it refers to the poem itself; that is, the poem is to be like its occasion and referent. Lyric poetry, perhaps more than any other genre or mode (Scharl, a dramatist as well, might dispute this), gains power from recursiveness. Strange to say, we like poems to comment on the art of poetry. 

The form of the poem is not so “free” as it might appear. The nineteen lines are disposed into two stanzas of six and one of seven. I read that as two stanzas corresponding to the six days of creation, and the final stanza drawing on the ancient Christian (and before that, Jewish) use of seven as a symbol of the very completeness or fullness about which the poem speculates. 

I would describe all of this as the achievement of technique. But the real charm of the poem comes from its observational acumen and the reflective sensibility it conveys: the insertion of “I think” is a necessity, happily not overlooked, in establishing that the poem is not just a thought but represents a sensibility, a lyric subjectivity or personality. The whole reminds me of Robert Bridges’ “The Evening Darkens Over” in its precision and restraint, formal and thematic. 

Technical virtuosity is on display throughout the collection, in both free and metrical verse: from expert use of punctuation (a single comma) in “My Children Gather Acorns” that would have made Ben Jonson proud, to the perfect management of vocalic sound in a line such as “those bruised, oracular trees” in “New Year’s Morning” (say the line aloud and feel the vowels dance back and forth between front and back, high and low).  

But from lyric poetry we sometimes desire more than technical finesse and well-honed observation. We desire wisdom, if we can get it, and failing wisdom then the quest for wisdom that we call wonder and doubt and speculation. From technique and the poet’s sensory attunement we may have music and something of an antidote to the digital distractions of the age. But a poet with a real capacity for reflection can safeguard us as well against the ideological temptation that assails as constantly as the technological.  

That inwardness is already on display in “Spring Evening.” It flourishes most magnificently, perhaps, in the collection’s persona poems “The Widow of Cana”, “Penelope” and the title poem “Ponds,” of which the speaker is Theoderic the Ostrogoth. The first of these gives us the voice of a bereaved and bitter woman, who can—with justification, we feel—insist that “water into wine is not enough.” By way of a far stronger allusion to a specific poem than the one in “Spring Evening,” the poem in the voice of Penelope delivers a bold rebuttal to Tennyson’s famous “Ulysses” when Penelope claims for herself—again, with justification—a spirit of place to which her storied spouse could not attain. To “Ponds” I’ll return presently. 

The poet’s philosophical sensibility is as much on display in her own voice. It can be honest and vulnerable, as when, in “Part,” she writes:  

                    It’s always troubled me, that mystery
                    of the Ascension, the Divine coming
                    and going casual as a morning visit,
                    always promising he’ll be back. 

There is a degree of empathy needed for this kind of writing, and the ability to introduce metaphysical speculation through the most concrete of circumstances. But in a poem like “The Lark Ascending over Phoenix,” we leave what Dorothy Sayers called the poetry of search for what she thought of as the equally important poetry of statement. This is a poetry which can win to insight and conclusion: 

                                        . . .Some things cannot be
                    known. To reveal themselves, they bring to mind
                    the very things they are not. So music
                    can invoke silence, and movement
                    can mean stasis. 

There is an elegiac quality to this collection, and a fierceness and willingness to ponder or complain like Ecclesiastes and Job. The moments of serene resignation are hard won. No doubt this quality comes in part from the poems or passages that mourn the long illness and eventual death of the poet’s mother. It might seem strange, then, when I say my first impression of Ponds, and the one that remains with me still, is that of fullness of life. There is a contradiction at work which may be best expressed by Theoderic the Ostrogoth in the title poem:  

                    What a strange thing is life,  
                    and small! Look: the clouds hang low,
                    and we will soon have rain.  

Theoderic, a dying man caught between epochs, grasps at the wisdom of the lilies of the field: that is cherished most truly which is held most lightly. And for this poetic persona, sight (the lowering sky) and insight (the smallness of life—Julian of Norwich, in a different mood, will call it a hazelnut) are finally as inseverable as soul and body in this or in any life we would call full.  

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Jonathan Geltner is the translator of Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes (Angelico Press) and the author of Absolute Music: a novel (Slant Books). He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and children.