By Tessa Carman

A good guide welcomes her charges into a new building, book, or idea, and prepares them for encounter, perhaps struggle, and for unexpected delight. She pulls open doors previously locked, unveils portraits, and leads the group up balustrades, through vaults, and up turret stairs, peering into transoms, calling attention to cornices and corbels and rayonets. But she never gets in the way of the encounter; she arranges, interprets, but ultimately steps aside so that they can see for themselves. 

A good teacher is a guide, who has also been the seeker, the asker of questions, and remains so, even as she becomes someone who inspires others to see, to seek and question, and then to make their own songs, sculptures, portraits, craft. 

Betsy Brown is that kind of docent, and her debut poetry collection, City Nave (Resource Books, 2024), is structured like a cathedral, comprising four sections: “Stairs” leads us to the “Narthex,” a sort of waiting room before entering the sanctuary, the “Nave,” at the center, within which we find the “Altar.” 

I love showing Betsy Brown’s poems to my students. There’s a quality to the poetry that makes it an especial joy to share her with young people on the cusp of adulthood. Hers is a wise and winsome voice that has that golden quality of a good teacher. She respects the intelligence of her students, her audience. And she passes on the fruits of her own keen attention, inviting them in to see better—sometimes by asking them with her lively language to stand on their heads while they look.

The opening poem considers “young pagans” who “scrawl / inky runes into their hands / with cheap pens” as “the world falls,” wondering “if / they will learn to rebuild it.” Later we climb the steep stairs of Paris’s “Basilique du Sacré-Coeur” (the poem is shaped like a stair) alongside the homeless, loiterers, and tourists and consider “A Ripe June Strawberry” with “a hole in the middle of your fat red heart.” The poet contemplates “wine-dark” chrysanthemums, Manhattan the “massive cavern of my youth,” and Phoenix, Arizona, amidst the smoke of a recent “conflagration of car engine.” 

Brown plays with free verse and traditional form delightfully, making use of both regular and irregular music. I often give some of the more tightly formed poems to my students to show them what poems can do—and what they, the students, can do too. Each year I read Chaim Potok’s The Chosen with a group of middle schoolers, and at the end I share Brown’s “Friendship: An Interlude,” which is dedicated to Danny Saunders, the troubled young Hasid from the novel. The five quatrains of “Friendship” each begin with the same line: “Silence is seldom a quiet thing,” with an aaba rhyme scheme. I tell my students to notice how this same line changes in nuance and meaning by the time the final lines come. (Who was it that said, “The only honest response to a work of art, is another work of art”?) 

Another one I share is “Cursive,” a pantoum whose lines beautifully run together, then fracture, then smooth out again. 

“Pupils” is a palindrome that transforms the pupil of an eye—the “tunnel with light at both ends”—into a student. It’s a lovely poem with a touch of humor (a pupil and a student are both a “sometimes-shuttered window, yawning”) that captures the love of a teacher for a student–who is also the “tunnel with light at both ends,” into whom one must speak “just what you mean, / Looking into it honestly.” This frank, teacherly compassion is shown in other poems, such as “To a Cutter, Age 14” and “Entanglement Theory.” 

In “Trappist Abbey After Rain,” the poet turns to her own teacher, nature, to listen to the song of insects as she steadies herself: 

   My silence bade this celebration sound 
   Loud enough for my oft-distracted ear, 
   Which, when at rest, is finally generous, 
   And welcomes all the poor I never hear, 
   The lowly ones of antenna and wing, 
   Who, in their smallness, still know how to sing. 

Brown both pays attention to these small, seemingly insignificant creatures, and reveals them to be significant through that very attention. But she also casts her gaze and her meditation toward the transcendent—“deep down things”—as well as skywards. 

It comes as no surprise Brown is a teacher, but she’s also a writer who has a spirit at turns vagabond, gardener, and songster. Hers is the pilgrim soul who loves attending to the world, and singing of what she finds, whose songs are inspired by the attention that is love. 

As I reread the poems I was struck by their tightly woven strands, how the sections and poems truly build on each other and mean by themselves and also in their placement (yes, like a well-ordered music album): The title poem, “City Nave,” concludes the third section, which then leads us to the final section, the “Altar,” the holiest place, where traditionally—in both Jewish and Christian traditions—only those who are carefully and properly prepared can go. 

So the book is a path to better-seeing for each pilgrim that enters its pages. The architectural framework is hence very fitting for a pilgrimage, which are usually done on foot. You can’t Zoom into a pilgrimage. You can’t SparkNote your way. You have to put on your own shoes and take the steps yourself.

The penultimate poem on this journey, “Turbulence,” concerns a plane crash wherein a student has died. Each of the five quatrains is a variation of the first line: “My student’s plane crashed in the snow.” The first stanza continues: 

   I never quite know how to pray 
   For the dead. But I often try. 

I won’t give away the profound and poignant ending of the final poem, “Buying a House on the Feast of Saint Francis,” but it too plays with paradox in a way that casts the world in a new light. It also reveals the ultimate reason why I love sharing Brown’s poems with my students: She shows us how to “stand on your head” to see anew and reminds that the way to “rebuild the world” is through attention—through love. And love deepens with walking the pilgrim way. 

---

Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.