Kerygma Nights

So much of our poetry its surrealist pizzazz and saccharine beauty wears a missionary's dubious smile. Not this. Zavgren's book concedes nothing to persuade us or to woo us and yet line by line it demands everything. It confronts us with the fact of an inimitable and articulate mystery. She pretends to be a naïve pastoralist or the Queen of Swords and she does indeed know her zinnia and zelkova-and hold the key to the tower. But every seduction is the kerygma. The actual is evangelical; her flowers put nature in abeyance. And her testimony to the laminations of shale the secret calibrations of the karmendriyas to the floods of Blood Brook and to the catalpa with its turgid beans to the ordeal of beauty and the ecstasies of absence to fornex nights and the tzimtzum of thought and the great gangsa of the sun-these are the tidings of our Golgotha morning foreshortening every grief and a continent of distances. -- Joel Newberger