A Plot of Light

Lynn R. Szabo is chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

McCaslin’s ninth volume of poetry arrives as a quaternary of
contemplative moments of encounter and embrace. Its “tender and
inward” reconciliations of life and art are portrayed in intricacies
of language that enchant and invite intellectual and spiritual
engagement from the reader. The portraiture encompasses her private
familial experience (birth, deaths, and love) along with her paths of
pilgrimage to Thomas Merton’s childhood home in Prades, France, and
the Black Madonna at Montserrat, Spain, and later, moments of retreat at
Queenswood House near Canada’s West Coast ocean and mountains. The
collection coheres around the “plots of light”/ “clear-eyed
intuition(s)” in this poet/mystic’s finely beaded narrative.

The poems are the highly literate self-disclosings of a poet-professor
who seeks the contemplative’s freedom from the dilemma of language as
the negotiator of experience: “[W]ords, my profession / words, my
accusers.” In the collection’s epigraph, the poet claims the space
of dreams, visions, and prophesies (Joel 2:28) as the arbitrating
hermeneutic for her poetics. “Sun Gold” paints this space with its
Blakean apostrophe: “Tongue-tied then and now / I track the old
ravines, / stumble in the gullies and ditches/ losing and finding myself
/ a thousand times / in your luminescence.” Allusions to Greek
mythology, Hebrew scriptures, and Christian iconography are
counterpointed with echoes of the mystical voices of William Blake,
Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil.

In this volume, McCaslin’s work resonates with a mature poet’s
largesse of music and image. Grammatical symmetry, paradox, synesthesia,
and the beauty of her conflation of word and sense result in the
pleasures of sophisticated artistry. Her revisitation of her father’s
death is shatteringly moving but perhaps the most beautiful of the
entries is a sonnet, “No Palinode,” in which the tender mercies of
“the rightness of the path [they] carve” avows the “constant
Love” of the writer’s Anne Bradstreet-like honouring of her marriage
and family. The pleasure and pain of existence—the “grim qualities
of baleful Time”—offer us a “sacramental meal” in this lovely
volume.