Lent, Kate Cayley
Book*hug Press, 2023
Those readers with Catholic backgrounds will know that the season of Lent is about giving things up, about sacrificing pleasures and things that might be excessive. Given the time we’re living in, the poems in Kate Cayley’s Lent—including the title poem—ask the reader to consider their place in the often-shallow and superficial secular world. Here are poems where attention to detail is often referenced, with a suggested connection to repetition, in a way that echoes prayer. Cayley’s long prose poem, “Lent,” was the winner of the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, so the common themes and questions that arise in the book include an emphasis of attention to detail—in terms of being aware of the world around you—to repetition, as well as to ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, and praise all seem fitting.
The first poem in the collection, “Attention,” sets the thematic tone of Lent, beginning with an “And if” clause that leads to “then I will believe” statement that loops the poem into a framed reflection about how “repetition could itself be/a form of attention.” Beginning with “And if” signals to the reader that this will be a piece that continues an earlier conversation inside the poet’s mind—something that has been thought about and worried through to find itself on the page. In the following poem, “Ice Sheet,” a child’s sense of wonder draws the reader’s attention to the detail of an ice puddle on a walkway: “He is/secretive in his reverent/curiosity, face bent/out of my sight. The adult has missed the wonder and curiosity, busy in dealing with the demands of a hectic daily routine, but the boy is transfixed with noticing the tiniest of details when his boot shatters the fragile skin of the puddle.
Time, and its passage, also plays a thematic role in Cayley’s poems. In “Falling,” the poet considers her son’s growing independence as he gets older. Walking home from the store, she goes one way, and he goes the other, and she watches as her son disappears around the corner. In “Blue Houses,” an elderly woman dressed in “a housedress splotched with blue roses” shuffles outside, speaking Polish “in the direction of her neighbour, who doesn’t//answer.” The poet forecasts the woman’s inevitable death, knowing that she herself is also becoming “an exemplar of something/vanishing.” Everything is temporary, and so the reader is reminded to pay attention to the beauty in life, to praise life itself.
Often, the reader will find themselves considering how the past so easily edges into the present and future, how humans are drawn to the art of the past as respite, and how we lament the environmental losses and crimes of our current century. In the face of horror, a judge at The Hague escapes the testimony of witnesses from the Bosnian war by telling someone “I look at the Vermeers,” knowing that their painted light will save him as he faces listening to remembered atrocities. In “Red-footed Tortoise, Science Centre,” the poet reflects on a tortoise that is trapped in a false rain forest, “The tortoise, glass-boxed,/heaves from corner to corner as if the earth/could be reduced to this. As if we could be forgiven.” In “Trying to Explain Time to Children,” too, Cayley opens the poem with: “You will not recognize it. It will feel ordinary,” continuing to ponder the ways in which we notice time’s movement as we get older.
Cayley’s poems about Assia Wevill (the partner of Ted Hughes who killed herself in the same manner as Sylvia Plath), Anne Sexton, and Mary Shelley, are stunning ones. In “Assia Wevill Considers Herself,” the poet channels Assia’s voice to say, hauntingly: “Nothing here is mine. I’ve used her leavings,/fitted my hands into her rubber gloves,/her relinquished scissors.//She knows that for me nothing worked/and this pleases her.” In “Glasses,” we find the disturbing poem about the American billionaire who purchased Anne Sexton’s glasses after her death, putting them in “a temperature-controlled case/like an artifact.” The poet asks: “Does he gloat over the glasses, think about the/woman in her car?” In “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster,” Cayley takes on Shelley’s persona as she asks the monster to take tea with her, with them dancing together at the end of the poem. They find strange solace in being outcasts—she as a woman and the monster as a monster.
The title poem ends the collection, underlining the thematic threads that work their way through Lent. There is so much here—in the final prose piece—and in the collection that speaks to the ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, attention to detail, wonder, and curiosity. In our noticing the details, Cayley suggests—and in the repetition and mindfulness of our noticing—we praise what we’re a part of, and so enter a type of devotion and honouring that does not find itself in a church building, but rather in the connections we make with others in community.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com