Being Here
Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love
By Pádraig Ó Tuama
Eerdmans, 175 pages, $22.99
Invocation
Collected Poems (1973-2021)
By Travis T. DuPriest
DuPriest Books, 240 pages, $27.95
Certain poems read like prayer. This is certainly true of these two books. The Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama was writer in residence at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan during 2000, and Being Here is described as a collaboration between him and those who attended his sessions. The widow of Travis DuPriest — a former director of the DeKoven Center in Racine, TLC’s longtime book review editor, and a priest, poet, and teacher — has collected all his verse in one volume. Invocations are often addressed to a deity, and are thus a form of prayer.
Ó Tuama’s book is arranged as a month’s retreat of daily meditation with prayer, a brief Scripture reading, a collect, and a “remembering prayer.” It is best read in this fashion. The poet also has included essays on a variety of related topics. He sees Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness as a dialogue not with Satan but with his inner conflict.
He explains that the manger where Mary and Joseph lay their newborn infant is in the house of the people they’re staying with, where livestock are brought in at night to provide heat. Because of the Roman census, the households in Bethlehem were overcrowded, but the original story isn’t meant to be as unfriendly as later readings have made it. The “inn” is a kataluma, the upper room of a house like the Upper Room later in Luke’s gospel where the Last Supper takes place.
Ó Tuama says the form of collects is fivefold:
Name the one you’re praying to,
Unfold the name of the one you’re praying to,
Name one desire,
Unfold the desire you’ve named,
Finish with [Amen].
Thus the collect for Day 4:
Householders of Bethlehem,
When your upper room was full
you welcomed unknown kin in
to your living room: your floor;
your beds; your mangers full of
Hay, the place where your born
children had been warmed.
No nasty innkeepers, just houses
crammed with people keeping
empire at bay. No rejection, just
ordinary hospitality.
In all our hospitalities, help us
give and take. May exchanges be
warmed by hearts open to change.
Because this is how God made
a home among people. Because
this is how people make homes
Around a newborn God.
Amen.
Being Here is chock full of insights, revelations, and surprises — even shocks — that have certainly deepened my prayer life.
The late Travis DuPriest believed that “poems invite the reader into an experience with the writer,” that poems live on sound and image, and that the strongest poems create an interplay between external observation, internal reflection, and literary or mythic allusion, so that the poem “reminds the reader of his or her own mytho-poetic past.”
As a priest and educator, he often taught creative writing classes, and had a sharp sense of satire that can make the reader laugh out loud, as in the poem “Creative Writing 101,” which instructs the angels named in Revelation. He often parodies the kind of waffle that public readings use to introduce work. His verse often is directed to other poets, from Thomas Traherne, Emily Dickinson, and Ezra Pound to some of the Beats, as well as recent formalists like James Merrill and Amy Clampitt, although there is nothing derivative in his homage. In “Lenten Walk” he says,
And I think of young George Herbert, lying
All night on that cold floor, face down
in Bemerton, frightened to death of the vows
he would take on the morrow, planting
himself then in silence, trusting to take hold.
Mabel DuPriest’s thematic arrangement of these poems, written over a lifetime, with many published in smaller volumes, is helpful to the reader.
DuPriest is never tritely pious. In “Forgive Thou, Lord, My Belief,” he confesses to the kind of religious attitudes that stultify, such as “limpid refusals to dance”:
When you piped. Forgive me, Lord,
for seeking truth rather than joy,
security rather than life, increase of
faith instead of You.
For asking for forgiveness
instead of a blessing on my unbelief.
These eloquent and refreshing poems enrich both unbelief and faith.
Phoebe Pettingell is a writer and editor living in northern Wisconsin.