Hoping for Angels

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

Hoping for Angels comprises four sections. It opens with two suites of
poems, “The Blue Man is Drowning Again” and “Hoping for Angels”;
there follows a loosely collected sequence of prose poems, “A Memory
of Winter”; and the book ends with the suite of prose poems “A
Thousand Swallows.” The heart of the book beats in the first two
suites, though there are some striking poems elsewhere.

The “blue man” personifies a worldview imbued with despair that
struggles to accept and be delivered from itself into a rapturous and
visionary hope. O’Connell earns the right to hope despite this
despair, by poetically probing and transforming rather than denying it.
The arena of action is interior, rather than communal; but he speaks to
all who are troubled by the ubiquitous polarity of disappointment and
faith. What hope can help balance sadness? There is the ancient hope of
deliverance, nourished in a fierce clarity of yearning. There is a
visionary acceptance of life’s outcasts as welcoming and elevating
companions, offering the healing solidarity of tramps. The last shall
come first. And there is a way of looking at the small particulars of
the world that sacramentalizes them with a revelatory and jewel-like
significance: “one silver wheel cover / wobbles its way / down the
road.”

The suite “Hoping for Angels” balances the blue man’s despair
with beatitudes of the imagination. Blessings come in surrendering to
beauty in the particularity of things. This beauty can make an Eden of
earth, and is the only true preparation for love and dying. It reveals
itself to those who notice hidden resemblances between things: a
cauliflower is like a tree. Seeing creatively, by a great pattern of
analogies, bestows a deep sense of personhood on one. These are “Inner
Riches,” better known to the poor than the rich, who are distracted by
power and possessions from seeing things ever fresh and anew.

Though Hoping for Angels is O’Connell’s first collection of poems,
a distinctive voice speaks strongly in it, with things to say. His
second collection should be awaited with anticipation.