“This isn’t about prayer as such” What happens when a devoutly Christian poet meets a devoutly atheist book reviewer? This review. One on Helen Losse‘s Better with Friends — an essay that begins fraught with troblems and prubbles! My own. All readers bring some emotional baggage with them, a tote bag or overnight case, to the poems they read. I knew of one woman whose husband‘s favorite poet was Frost; she tossed the New England bard‘s collected works when hubby became her ex. A teetotaler fan told me he‘d been snubbed at a publishing party by a celebratory Thom Ward in his cups, and henceforth forswore ever reading the poet again. But a reviewer brings a steamer trunk of emotional history to her work. Reviewing is an intimate experience. When I read and reread and reread Better with Friends, I carried with me through Losse‘s lines a childhood in which my abusive father beat my mother and me. And teenage years that culminated with my father quitting his job and abandoning my mother for another woman. He was a Methodist minister who‘d made a mockery of Christianity, leaving me in his wake of destruction and cruelty an atheist with a thorough distaste for religion. As Losse writes in the opening poem, ―The Kidnapping of Aimee:‖ ―the past is never ‗just the past.‘‖ I‘ll say. No one said that the Tao of poetry reading was going to be easy. I take what the Universe delivers, because, like all books reviewed for this regular column, Helen Losse‘s Better with Friends came to me via a TCE reader. In this case, it was TCE contributor Scott Owens who wrote a blurb for Losse‘s new book and subsequently reviewed it. My turn had come. And it was my responsibility to stifle my gag reflex at the word ―prayer‖ (which occurs 14 times in her 83-page book), set my prubbles with Christian faith and the Bible (quoted only twice) aside and give Losse her due. As reviewer Sherry Chandler observed in her EarthPal review of Better with Friends, Losse‘s ―Christian spirituality often comes through in her writing; it‘s not preachy or self-righteous.‖ That‘s true, although a moment or two of doubt might help leaven Losse‘s devoutness for her non-believing and agnostic readers, as Christian poet Kathleen Norris did in her Journey: New and Selected Poems, making them quite palatable to me. Yet I overcame my troblem with Losse‘s poems such as ―Church When They Had No Pianos,‖ with its imperative to ―Clap with your hands, / Praise be to God.‖ I‘m content to live ―divorced from the cross‖ like the sinner in ―a third row seat‖ in ―The Triple Evils Presented in No Particular Order.‖ After all, ―this isn‘t about prayer as such,‖ as she says in part 7 of ―Where the Reverie Is Apt to Lead,‖ which was first published in these pages* in November 2006. I stuck with it — and discovered Losse‘s poetry is ultimately redemptive. Her salvific grace is the elegance of her poetry.
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