Review by Ron Dart.
(Preface by Kathleen Norris, Edited by Lynn R. Szabo. New
York: A New Directions Book, 2005.)
“Put simply, Merton is one of our great poetic talents of the twentieth century.”
—Robert
McDowell, The Hudson Review
“He (Merton) has now secured his stature in the pantheon of
important twentieth century American poets.”
—Lynn R. Szabo
I think poetry must
I think poetry must
Stay open all night
In beautiful cellars
—Thomas Merton, Canto 53 (Cables to
the Ace)
The Canadian West Coast has done much to encourage and
promote the visionary life and thinking of Thomas Merton (1915-1968). The 1978
conference at the University of British Columbia birthed two seminal books: Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical
Study (1978), by George Wood*censored*, and Thomas
Merton: Pilgrim in Process ((1983), edited by Donald Grayston and Michael
Higgins. The Eighth Conference and General Meeting of the International Thomas
Merton Society was held at UBC from June 5-7, 2003. This yet further
consolidated the role of the Canadian Pacific Rim in Merton studies.
Ross Labrie (from UBC) has been a towering Canadian figure
in the world of Merton scholarship, also.
Lynn Szabo was a student of Labrie, and In The Dark Before Dawn, she both deepens and goes further into
Merton’s poetry than Wood*censored* and sensitively compliments the work of Labrie.
There is no doubt the time has come to see that at the core
of Merton’s soul he was a poet, and he was an incisive and insightful poet. The
poetic impulse was in Merton from the beginning to the end of his journey, and
he engaged many of the major poets of the
20th century. Merton had a unique and uncanny way
if heeding and hearing the best and most demanding questions of modern poets.
Szabo suggests, in her well crafted introduction, that Merton’s literary
mentors were Joyce, Eliot, Auden, Lowell, Williams, Levertov and ‘some of the
Beats’, and he was taken and held by such Spanish and Latin-American poets as
Lorca, Parra, Neruda, Cuadra, Cardenal and Grinberg. Pasternak and Milosz called forth much from him, and Blake and
Hopkins lived in his beautiful cellars. Merton refused to flinch from the hard
questions, and he offered a challenging perspective on the substantive
questions of the time.
In The Dawn Before
Dark, we get a sustained taste for Merton at his most evocative. The table
is spread wide, and the feast is laid out in all its fullness. Szabo has
arranged Merton’s poetry into various and varied tendencies and inclinations.
The reader cannot but be held by the wide range of Merton’s interests and
commitments.
In The Dawn Before
Dusk is divided into eight sections: I) Geography’s Landscapes, II) Poems
from the Monastery, III) Poems of the Sacred, IV) Songs of Contemplation, V)
History’s Voices: Past and Present, VI) Engaging the World, VII) On Being Human
and
VIII) Merton and Other Languages. Each of these sections, in
an exquisite and nuanced way, draws deep from the well of Merton’s life giving
poetic struggles. Merton refused to separate the sacred from the secular, the
inner from the outer, contemplation from politics, eternity from time. It was in his willingness to face into the
storm of the modern world, and write about it in a compelling way, that Merton
can still speak to us.
This collection of poetry does two important things that
previous compilations of Merton’s poetry have not yet done. First, Szabo says,
“The current selection seeks to include more poems from the latter period of
Merton’s writings, with considerable representation of the antipoetry collected
in Cables to the Ace (1967) and The Geography of Lograire (1968))”.
Second, Szabo has included the controversial love poetry written to a nurse
Merton met when he was ill and hospitalized. Most of these poems have been
held, thus far, in private collections.
Merton had a fondness for the silent season when much was
quiet yet yearning for life in the dark before dawn. It was from such a place
that he heard and wrote. As dawn past and day arrived, Merton then spoke from
such a listening post. In The Dawn Before
Dark highlights, in the clearest and most poignant manner, the life and
light Merton managed to see in the dark before the dawn. This needful and
timely text is a must read for those keen to feel the beating heart and mind on
fire of Merton as poet, contemplative monk and political activist.
rsd