{"id":716,"date":"2021-05-21T14:32:25","date_gmt":"2021-05-21T18:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=716"},"modified":"2021-05-21T14:32:25","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T18:32:25","slug":"review-of-hope-of-stones-by-anna-elkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=716","title":{"rendered":"Review of Hope of Stones by Anna Elkins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Anna Elkins. Hope of Stones. <\/em>Press 53. 2020. 65 pages. $14.95. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna Elkins\u2019 Hope of Stones <\/em>is organized around one of the most unusual premises I\u2019ve seen in a collection of contemporary poetry. Two historical figures dominate the collection, Teresa of \u00c1vila, 16th<\/sup> century nun, saint, and author of The Interior Castle, <\/em>and Charles-Axel Guillaumot, 18th<\/sup> century French architect who created catacombs beneath Paris in order to reinforce tunnels under the city that had been dug to extract building stones. A third figure, the poet, communicates with both, often revealing intersections between them. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The poems are laid out on the page distinctly, with the architect\u2019s aligning with the bottom margin, the nun\u2019s justified right, and the poet\u2019s conventionally justified left and beginning near the top margin. What begins with an author\u2019s obsessive interest in two unrelated persons eventually reveals that very few objects or ideas, not to mention people, are in fact separated from each other. What have stones to do with light, or bones to do with prayer?\u2014as much, it turns out, as imminence has to do with transcendence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collection is arranged into three sections, \u201cpray,\u201d \u201cbuild,\u201d and \u201cwonder.\u201d Each of those words would seem to be affiliated with one of the characters speaking through the collection, but each section includes poems of all three individuals; readers realize that wonder is often a form of prayer, as is building. In attempting to understand the architect and the nun, the poet is also attempting to understand herself, of course, as well as the world and its creator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe Poet, Fasting,\u201d the speaker describes a fast required by a dental procedure, considering how mundane necessity sometimes leads to revelation. \u201cI lie beneath the maple tree on a quilt & watch \/ the sky beneath branches,\u201d she says. Though her thoughts wander, they remain focused primarily on the practical: \u201chow all these leaves will need \/ raking come fall, what to juice for second breakfast, \/ when to run the dishwasher.\u201d Here the poem shifts, exactly in its center, to explore the nature of women mystics, women required to attend to household tasks regardless of their spiritual lives. We might think of Teresa of \u00c1vila here, or as likely, the many women whose names are lost to history. The speaker, the poet, as is evident here and in several other poems, longs for mystical experience: \u201cTranscendence\u2014\/ I am the woman lying beneath the tree & the woman \/ floating above it, hoping to see God.\u201d This description of transcendence is provocative. The woman remains attached to earth, her entire body literally in touch with it. Yet she also drifts upward, letting go of whatever tethers her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In poems like this, the poet\u2019s attraction to a figure like Teresa is understandable. Yet the architect, too, though he was not professionally\u2014or perhaps even personally\u2014religious, encounters suggestions of the transcendent daily. He is saving Paris from literal collapse by shoring up its foundation with the skeletons of its dead. Nothing conveys mortality like bones. Regardless of one\u2019s beliefs about the subject, thoughts of mortality almost inevitably lead to questions of immortality, of whether \u201cthis\u201d\u2014this world, this physical life\u2014is all there is, of, in other words, dreams of transcendence. \u201cThe Architect & the Macabre\u201d describes Guillaumot\u2019s work most directly. Here it is in its entirety:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thousands of carts of bones, of earth, of coffin
wood. Hundreds of torches & ells of canvas.
Dozens of pounds of candles & solder. One
goal: to empty the cemeteries. This collection
of skeletons will be unsurpassed. At Montrouge,
we dump the bones into a hole, & a dangling
chain scatters them as they fall. At the bottom,
we arrange them in columns & rows, creating
friezes of femurs & walls of skulls. Bones of third-
century saints\u2014those who died before Saint Denis
Christianized the city\u2014mix with bones of those
I might have known. Epochs & generations
blend, no origin left to matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The physical description here is<\/em> macabre. Bones of saints and bones of sinners are reinterred together, their mass grave simply a solution to a problem of physics. The architect doesn\u2019t even gesture to the sacred. The ultimate arrangement of the bones might seem artful, but the goal is practical rather than aesthetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the poems of the nun and of the poet vary in form, nearly all of the poems of the architect are formatted this way, in a single block stanza, each line approximately the same length, the stanza most often between 10 and 15 lines. The form reproduces the architect\u2019s thinking and observation; masonry relies on regularity. Mysticism, on the other hand, defies order. Although the rhythm in the architect\u2019s poems is not metrically regular, the lines are tight, with plenty of accented syllables. One of the most interesting aspects of these poems, in terms of craft, is how Elkins uses the line in the architect\u2019s poems. In \u201cThe Architect and the Macabre,\u201d most lines are enjambed, but it is the nature and variety of the enjambment that interests me. In the first line, the enjambment is dramatic\u2014\u201ccoffin\u201d parallel to \u201cbones\u201d and \u201cearth\u201d but leading to a single syllable, \u201cwood,\u201d beginning the second line, a period immediately following \u201cwood.\u201d The opposite strategy occurs in line three, with a period occurring just before the last syllable of the line: \u201csolder. One \/ goal.\u201d This enjambment significantly disrupts the grammar of the sentences, forcing the reader to pause at that insistent break. In line eight, however, the enjambment encourages the reader to rush on to the next line, as line eight ends with a present participle: \u201cwe arrange them in columns & rows, creating \/ friezes\u2026\u201d This is the type of enjambment T.S. Eliot uses to begin \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d: April is the cruelest month, breeding \/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing \/ Memory and desire\u2026\u201d The participle nearly deletes the pause at the line break, forcing the reader beyond mere grammatical sense. Elkins\u2019 line break here emphasizes the architect\u2019s creative endeavor, though it will remain almost invisible to those who benefit from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much more so than with end-stopped lines, enjambment compounds the meaning of the sentences. Line twelve, for example, reads as a sentence whose meaning differs from the actual sentences, \u201cI might have known. Epochs and generations.\u201d Read as a unit, that line suggests more than the sentences do alone:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026Bones of third-
century saints\u2014those who died before Saint Denis
Christianized the city\u2014mix with bones of those
I might have known. Epochs & generations
blend, no origin left to matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elkins\u2019 skill with craft equals the uniqueness of her content. She is the author of several other books, including an earlier collection of poetry, The Space Between. <\/em>Although she writes in many genres,  readers who enjoy The Hope of Stones <\/em>will find many of the others gratifying also, for her focus is consistent across genres\u2014travel and spirituality, the inner and outer journeys, and the correspondence between them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna Elkins. Hope of Stones. Press 53. 2020. 65 pages. $14.95. Anna Elkins\u2019 Hope of Stones is organized around one of the most unusual premises I\u2019ve seen in a collection of contemporary poetry. Two historical figures dominate the collection, Teresa of \u00c1vila, 16th century nun, saint, and author of The Interior Castle, and Charles-Axel Guillaumot, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[53,54,49],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek","tag-anna-elkins","tag-hope-of-stones","tag-press-53"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":719,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions\/719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}