Rod Jellema, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, has released a collection of poetry that distills his 40 year career into Incarnality, an embodiment of physically and spiritually gifted poems that tug against each other, jostling for an one up on the other. Incarnality isn’t a typical collection, nor a collected, but rather new married with older work creating a thematic arc stretching back to the poet's youth, and ahead towards future selves. In many ways Incarnality is a self affirmation of the poet’s voice and craft, and of mankind and our clumsy fumbling about in the world as we try to transcend flesh. It’s a book that longs for spiritual grace and finds it in the physical, carnal world, and it’s that tension between the earthiness of experience and the transcendence of the spirit that give Jellema's poems wings.
In “Reading Faces” the speaker recalls on a snowy travel worn night, his father who worked with drunks, who said:
Addiction… is 80 to 100 percent proof that spirit exists
and that it craves to be incarnate, to be flesh.
But he saw how it sometimes runs in reverse,
The body craving spirit, fixing some drinkers onto
Highly distilled escapes from the world of matter
Looking for what is disembodied and timeless.
Addiction, like words, are abstract keys to the spirit, and some drunks wish to be free of their bodies, to give up the physical world in blackout binge, to join some larger party, in the same way a poet gives life to words by collecting them and organizing their power, giving up their music for a larger sound, a larger body Jellema argues a Democratic God, or more specifically Jesus, a higher power that isn’t abstract, and cannot be found on printed pages, but in the faces of the drunk, the poor, the homeless that shuffle at the edges of our lives.
Language, for Jellema, has its roots in his Frisian heritage, the varied tongues one hears moving from one culture to another, and some of the collections finest moments are when Jellema translates Frisian poets, or muses on his heritage such as in “Language Formation: An Introduction” where the “Frisians even now say little, but break/their diphthongs hard, make rough consonants in the quiet/churning of vowels.” Language, we are reminded, is our everyday music, given life by our breath; a theme that touches upon his dual lingua, his poetic voice, and the voice of the spirit, which is elusive, and musical, and slips beyond what we can touch. In “Some Things I Try to Forget” the speaker says “My voice makes a fist,” and Jellema wields language to fight, or even better, to sing in the shower, and how both scores make our flesh all the more fuller, richer. In his exploration of the word, the sounds of fricatives and plosives, Jellema considers Adam’s task of naming the world, the naming of fog, diary entries of those who died long ago; the Spanish of Nicaragua where he reminds us that Borges said “only a poem knows how to distrust the language.”
Incarnality includes an audio recording of the poet reading from his work, a trend that is finally coming around, after all, as Jellema knows, the music of language isn't written to sit on the page, it is written to lift off the page, a rolling tongue, a throat singing.
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