Literary / Arts
“Consider” by Susan McCaslin, 2023.
Patrick Jamieson
Volume 39 Issue 1,2,&3 | Posted: April 5, 2024
This is another brilliant book of poetry by Canada’s foremost Christian poet; someone who blends faith with literature seamlessly.
McCaslin is someone who combines Christianity, faith and religion as a suitable subject matter for the poetry she appears to breathe out religiously, to use an expression. And it’s fun. I find it awe striking at times.
Take the later section of Consider “Cracking The Jesus Koans”. It opens with this Thomas Merton quote from Mystics and Zen Masters: “The purpose of the zen koan is to bring the student by severe and ardent interior practice and the guidance and supervision of his Roshi to a state of pure consciousness which is no longer a ‘consciousness of’”.
Then her poem;
cracking cosmic eggs
making wise cracks
can open cracks
crack us up crumble our egos
without coercion
riddle ruminations
create new spaces
not for answers
not to solve Rubik’s cubes
or crosswords
but to surprise
awaken double us up in laughter
egg us on
to delectable wholeness
where we nest in the cracks
singing
Consider is McCaslin’s Contemplative stance toward the world and spiritual reality.
An important section of the book is dedicated to the Catholic poet Robin Blaser who was her Literature professor at Simon Fraser back in the day. I first heard of Blaser from Marnie Butler who was also in his class at SFU. She was struck by the pride he took in his Catholic culture framework in his approach to poetry. His collected works were issued under the title of The Holy Forest which I presented to Marnie when I stumbled upon its publication.
This section is titled ‘Reenacting the Sacred in Robin Blaser’s The Last Supper’ by Susan McCaslin.
“Marvellous and Astonishing – two memorable words I heard Robin Blaser utter when I first attended his Classical Backgrounds course on arriving at Simon Fraser University in the Fall of 1969. I was a twenty-two year old lapsed Presbyterian who had fallen in love with the Romantic poets. Soon Robin became my thesis adviser…I pursued Robin’s suggestion that Eureka was not a scientific treatise but a long poem, cosmogenic in origin. Robin asked me if I was a Catholic, but I explained this was not the case. I was already drawn to the mystical and esoteric streams of world religions. Later I learned Robin’s father had been a Mormon, his mother Roman Catholic. Given how ‘avant garde’ and ‘hip’ Robin was, I found it hard to believe he had once been an altar boy. I have raised the ghost of Robin’s childhood to contextualize both his rejection of repressive, dogmatic, homophobic, racist forms of religion and his simultaneous desire to probe to the heart of what he called ‘the sacred’ .”
Consider can be ordered by emailing GoldenEagleBooks@shaw.ca at the cost of $20.00 plus postage.
Patrick Jamieson