Lifting the Stone.

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Through her contemplative cadence, demanding diction, wide-ranging references, and intriguing insights, Lifting the Stone, McCaslin’s tenth volume of poetry, will appeal to travellers, gardeners, amateur naturalists, siblings, lovers, poets, teachers, readers, pacifists, and believers. The collection carries its communers from home to garden to Oxfordshire, New York, Arizona, Seattle, Langley, and Indonesia. McCaslin also moves her readers from creation to death to resurrection and from summer to Advent. This volume of poetry consists of four sections: “Codex,” “A Liturgy of Creatures,” “Lifting the Stone,” and “Water Corona” (which contains a single poem of the same name).

A recurring theme in the first section, “Codex,” is the relationship between body and soul/spirit, and, in the case of McCaslin’s students, between muddied writing and unsullied inspiration. In “Cribbed from My Students’ Essays,” McCaslin creates a humorous found poem from her students’ essays on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Othello. In “How My Students Inspire Poetic Thinking,” McCaslin considers her students’ writing as “no longer poetically marginalized / by my own marginal commentary.” Poems on living creatures such as insects, arachnids, birds, a sea turtle, a hare, a wolf, a squirrel, a ram, dogs, minks, cows, and ostriches inhabit McCaslin’s second section, “A Liturgy of Creatures.” McCaslin places her most evocative poems in the third section, “Lifting the Stone,” which also bears the title of this volume of poetry and includes a poem of the same name. McCaslin closely examines cultural/religious icons with “that frowning, burning babe” in “Advent,” “a Mediterranean peasant” in “Besotted with Jesus,” and the “friable carving / sculpted of sheer pain” that is “Mary Mother.” McCaslin persists in paying attention to language in “Recalling the Words,” focusing on terms such as reform, spirit, and god.” Highlights from the third section are “Faith is the Evidence,” which reworks Hebrews 11:1 in the Bible, and “Seven Ways of looking at Kingdom Prayer,” which recasts the Lord’s Prayer in seven different ways.

Overall, Lifting the Stone is an uplifting volume of poetry. Its probing, thought-provoking, celebratory, wholesome, and holy contents haunt and resonate.