O Is for Christmas
A Midwinter Night’s Dream
By Mia Anderson
St. Thomas Poetry Series, 81 pages, $25
Mia Anderson follows in the illustrious tradition of poet-priests such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But she can also add to her resumé: actor, chorister, shepherd, and goatherd.
In late October, her versatility as an actor was evident at the book launch of her latest work, O Is for Christmas: A Midwinter Night’s Dream, at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church in Toronto.
Anderson skillfully weaves wit and whimsy with thoughtful meditations in her seventh book of poetry. It is divided into three sections. The first, “The O Poems,” is based on the ancient succession of liturgical hymns known as the O Antiphons, which are traditionally sung in the eight days before Christmas Eve.
The second sequence, “The House of Advent A.D. 2019,” is constructed as an Advent calendar whose tiny doors open upon 25 different objects and observations.
The third section is a compelling narrative that expands on the carol “Good King Wenceslas” and is the longest but most accessible of all the poems.
French and Latin words are sprinkled throughout the first two poem sequences, not surprisingly, since Anderson is bilingual and lives in Québec; the Latin because she was for many years a high-church chorister.
But while Anderson has tended sheep and goats, she has not led a solely rural life. Many of her poems touch on sensitive events and issues. In the Advent calendar sequence, the door for “Advent One, Day Six” opens to reveal a tiny wristwatch stopped at 5:19 or 17h19, the hour of the horrendous massacre of 14 female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. Elsewhere she notes the plight of the Rohingyas and Syrian refugees.
At the book launch she was introduced by a fellow poet, Peter Norman, who observed that while her poetry is “engaged with political and ecological catastrophes and geopolitical strife, the poems are always aware of more abiding eternal concerns. They give us the present day in the context of the eternal; therefore, they keep the eternal always present.”
There is always much to ponder in Anderson’s poems, and some might welcome an annotated version of the first two poem sequences.
The third section, “The Day after Christmas,” a 20-page riff about Good King Wenceslas, is rollicking good fun that also embodies sound social justice. It deserves to be an audiobook voiced by Anderson, and a beautifully illustrated picture book. Indeed, it could serve as the basis for an animated film short. If you find yourself a bit lost in the first two poem sequences, don’t lose heart. The final poem opens:
’Twas the day after Christmas and all through the castle,
not a creature was stirring, not even a vassal.
Just as Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales has become a beloved read-aloud holiday classic, so might The Day After Christmas follow in its footsteps.
Rowan Willliams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and himself a poet-priest, has written the foreword to O is for Christmas. He praises Anderson’s poetry as “witty” but clarifies: “she can indeed be funny in a straightforward and disarming way (as her exuberant fantasia here on Good King Wenceslas shows), but the wit grows from a resonant awareness of how language plays until it finds its centre of gravity, oscillating over insights so poignant and demanding that they take up long-term-residence in the heart.”
Williams concludes that “if Christmas is indeed something to do with how what’s Not Just Us shows itself to be at home in us, even those who have no idea quite what they might be waiting for have a place at the (s)table.”
O Is for Christmas is Anderson’s second book of poetry with the St. Thomas Poetry Series (stthomaspoetryseries.com). St. Thomas’s has been her home in another sense: singing for many years in its choir stalls under the direction of John Tuttle. There she experienced her call to the priesthood in that music.
To do her divinity training, she had to leave her beloved Ontario farm with its sheep and goats. After ordination she accepted a parish in Québec City, but taking on (upon retirement) another lovely landscape: the francophone shores of the St. Lawrence, still in farming country, still producing poetry and vegetables.
This may seem a far cry from her five seasons at the Stratford Festival in Ontario or her four years acting in Britain, years of repertory theater across Canada or touring the nation with her one-woman show, 10 Women, 2 Men & A Moose, showcasing Canadian writers.
Yet going from the stage to the page, she has won the Malahat Long Poem Prize (twice), the National Magazine Award, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
Poetry readings at St. Thomas’s started in 1988 with the launch of the anthology Christian Poetry in Canada, edited by David A. Kent. The publication series began in 1996 to draw attention to Christian poetry in Canada. To date, 32 books have been published in the St. Thomas Poetry Series. It is a nonprofit venture; all proceeds from the sales of one book being used for the publication of the next in the series.
Sue Careless is senior editor of The Anglican Planet and author of the series Discovering the Book of Common Prayer: A Hands-On Approach. She is based in Toronto.