In this chapbook, winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, the title announces the theme; the poems locate it in the personal. Patrick Carrington touches on several kinds of "Thirst"--for communion and connection, for a deeper understanding of faith and the way it operates in daily life.
"Learning History in Nursery School" opens the collection with a tender scene--a father watching his small son fingerpaint on a rainy day. "He didn't repeat the world's mistakes./ He made the sun yellow, the sky as blue/ as a new boy.../" When a rainbow appears, signaling a moment of transformation, the speaker observes, "The sky was copying him, siphoning/ off the street some long forgotten oils."
The father and son relationships are drawn with care in this book. In "Finding the Sound of Oak," the narrator recollects climbing his father like a tree, and wonders if the dead "ever leave at all?/ Maybe/it's a trick, slipping into dirt/like a root." He returns with his regrets "to these woods with no tongue/and barefoot. To walk quietly,/listening for his risen bones."
Other portraits of grief are equally affecting--memories of lost love locked "In the Cedar Boxes of Our Souls," "... a wooden place/that hurts, but understands/the mathematics of the morning after/ and in "The Smoke of St. Anthony," where Carrington balances simple language with complex thought, the personal with the spiritual, building a poignant portrait of loss:
I used my last match and lit the candle,
watched smoke curl up to--where?--
Her, I imagined. A vain act of love
but full of sacrifice I thought,
as badly as I needed a drag.
And faith, as hard as days finish now
without her. They end stiffer than the wood
the sisters used to beat belief
and the blood of Jesus out of me. Yet I
come back for more. I called her name,
louder than I meant to. I heard it echo
in the rafters. The roof was higher
than her uncle's tobacco barn
where we lit our first cigarette,
where she always went to disappear
as quiet as a prayer.
I lit candle from candle, until the smoke
was thick. I just can't shake the hope
or kick the habit, the notion
she might be hiding up there,
waiting for me, swinging
her legs from the crossbeams.
This is sensuous, tactile work, alive and vivid. Although there is an elegiac undertone in some of the poems, reminding one of Frost's observation, "The poet rubs his fingers along old wounds, makes them burn," humor breaks through. A "...wife just knitted/ a wool sweater for their toy poodle. /Overkill, he told her. It already has/ a coat/" in "The Logic for Improving a Neighborhood" is one example of how the poet incorporates different tones in the same poem, and balances them all.
The way the poems are organized is another subtle delight of the book. The poet develops sequences of imagery, tone, and theme in "A Heraldry of Hands," for instance, which opens out into "First Lessons in Grace," threading the motif of hands through both poems. Repetitions like this build resonance and make the separate poems cohere. In "Searching for Things to Worship," the speaker's spiritual quest is once more reflected in a gesture:
Sorting through fluttering debris
of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle
browned with our absence,
I remember how you cupped
water at Cedar Creek,
your hands a chalice. And flowers
you planted near the bank
to make it your church,
somewhere to sit in the greening
comfort of a private prayer.
A place one might see God
and not be surprised.
Along with the lyric depth and philosophical sophistication, well-honed craft is evident in this work, the use of sound to control cadence and syncopation, assonance and consonance. Whether there's sometimes too much sibilance depends on a reader's taste; there is much to admire in the line breaks, with the last word in a line creating multiple, or sometimes half- meanings, displacing the expected and opening interpretation to a new circumstance created by the language.
W. H. Auden defined prayer as "to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention--on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God--that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying." With its reverence for nature and its embrace of what it means to be alive, "Thirst" has that quality of prayer. This meditative, attentive volume by a very thoughtful writer stands out. It is a thought-provoking read.
