The Sunrise Liturgy

A Poem Sequence

Mia Anderson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781620320167
  9781498263306
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498270557
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Committing theology to poetry is not new, but it's not wildly common. The Sunrise Liturgy aims to do just that. It is a sequence, like liturgy, with a start and a procession and a finish. The sun does the processing, and the play on sun and Son is never far from sight. Sunrise gives the cantus firmus to this theological theme and variations, where the going is by turns easy, by turns thickly polyphonic--take a deep breath! The cantus firmus shifts from voice to voice, disappearing, towards year's end, beyond the audible range of human mortals. But there are other mortals in this procession of the year, "acolytes of the Holy Impotence," and under and beside and through it all flows the St. Lawrence River, le fleuve, winding across the page, a tidal presence at once natural and mystical. As are the snow geese. As is the heron. There is an attempt to wrestle with a credible theodicy, especially environmental. There is a profound penchant for the eremitic, with nods to The Cloud of Unknowing and Gregory of Nyssa. And always there is the priestly sense of "performance," enactment, and Eucharist, for this is a priest speaking.

All Saints’ Eve

Sanctus, Sanctae, Sancti

shanti shanti shanti

Holy Holy Holy

the full moon

rising on All Saints’ Eve like a sun.

‘Om’ says the moon.

haloes aureoles nebulae

round the head

round the trunk

round the corps, sheaths of endurance, helmets of holiness

the bubble people in their loricas of luminescence

in their saintmobiles

in a world of pain, on the cutting edge of sanctity

they ride in

lancing the heart, the wound.

O quanta qualia! O great heart! Break —

Christ slivered into a million saints.

We get it wrong. All our dear hymns. The saints don’t wait.

It’s now. Into their incontaminate bubbles they go

parcelling up heaven and perambulating with it

heaven on rollerblades

come to a street near you.

Abelard not so far wrong — O quanta qualia

‘how immense, how wonderful’ the unfinished unfinishing

Sabbaoth, the éternuement éternel that passeth all imagining you can,

Ceci n’est pas un sunrise?

kidding!

utterly giddy with begotten glee

begoddening

as beseems.

But it’s not then, though also then.

We get this wrong.

It’s in the now of the allthewayness of the H word

that the H word figures

not in the exit from the great tribulation (though it was great)

or from the trouble-and-strife (saintly rhyming slang for ‘life’)

it’s the resurrection of the body now into

ambulatory temples padding about corridors or

blading down the Champs Élysées or

rough-sleeping it with the Radiance

post-hol...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Caveat Lector
• Readable But Not Read
• How Dawn
• Mixed Message
• Riverbreath
• Shorelight
• Shoreline
• ‘I Repeat Myself’
• In the Gloaming
• People Who Live
• The Raised Eyebrow
• Transfiguration
• Lenten Array
• Lent I : In the Blink
• Lent II : I’ve Done It Again! Says the Sun
• Lent III : Ochon Ochrie
• Laetare
• Lent V : Bystander at a Suicide
• Ffraed’s-Light
• Twig Sunday
• Seeing Through Holy Week
• One Last Sunrise
• Easter Morning
• The Eighth Day
• The Hermit at Sunrise
• The Swan at Sunrise
• The Crow at Sunrise
• The Heron Test
• Liturgical Colour Green
• Over and Over
• Madam’s Canon : Riff on a Folk-Round
• Whereas This River
• Aubades
• Born-Again Dawn
• Two-Fold This
• Sequence for a Fall
• ii) I Beheld Her
• iii) The Dumbshow Prologue
• iv) Wasn't This About Fire?
• v) One Sunrise He Reached
• All Saints’ Eve
• Paddle-to-the-Sea
• Vers Toi : Advent
• Rameau Dark
• December’s Faithful Eclipse
• Messe de Minuit
• One last crèche