BOOK REVIEWS
ODES, HOURS, IDYLLS, SONG: A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER by Darcy Blahut.
ISBN-13: 97809780083-5-2 (paperback). © 2010, self-published; 72
pp.; list price: $14.95. Available from Amazon.com or from the author’s
website: www.darcyblahut.sasktelwebsite.net. Reviewed by Shawn Sanford
Beck.
In the Christian
tradition, a Book of Common Prayer is a collection of liturgical texts
and rubrical commentary that binds together a worshipping community
through shared language, theological assumptions and communal spirituality.
It roots a people in its traditions and heritage, while at the same
time providing access via its living words to a reality that creates,
embraces and transcends the traditions embodied therein.
In Odes, Hours,
Idylls, Song, poet Darcy Blahut gifts us with a literary work worthy
of the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. The poetry is both lush
and dense, playful in its exploration of life and love, yet filled with
complexity to warrant multiple readings of the texts. In his concern
for “the beautiful, the true, and the good,” Blahut bears
witness to the possibilities of Spirit hidden in the stuff of daily
life.
While it might
seem like odd praise, this poetic work is indeed “common.”
Its subject matter is drawn from years of careful reflection on the
“common things”: family and love, work, nature, pain and
ecstasy. And yet these common realities are interwoven with ancient
myths, philosophical reflections and subtle references to the long history
of poetry itself. The reader is aided immensely by the generous inclusion
of endnotes, illuminating the ideas that punctuate the pages.
Odes is also
“common” in another sense: it is a successful attempt to
do justice to the inherited poetic forms which make up our communal
literary heritage. For Blahut, traditional structures of poesis are
not seen as burdensome husks to be thrown aside; rather they are gifts,
forms which allow poetry to be, like all good liturgy, the “work
of the people.” In his Foreword, Blahut comments that “it
would be unfortunate, to say the least, were we to treat traditional
metre as merely the tattered garments or unnecessary shackles of a language
to be abandoned without just cause. For poets, both the inherited rules
of language as well as their artful breaking stand as a means to convey
an inner song across an ever-shifting human span. Working into a poetic
form is one means of honouring the person and their tradition —
an honouring both spiritual and genealogical.”
While “common,” Odes is also definitely a work of prayer. Conscious of his own spiritual and cultural heritage, Blahut is not content to produce poetry for the sake of literary play alone. There is in this work a deep and strenuous yearning toward the Divine, toward Sophia, Holy Wisdom.
While not a
devotional or liturgical collection in the technical sense, Odes, Hours,
Idylls, Song gathers the scattered fragments of our shared life and
offers them in eucharistic oblation to the One who alone is worthy of
our “common prayer.”
May all
children here remember
those who sought to throw themselves
As one together on their verse;
look up and pleasure in the hallowed eve
As it was then, is now, and ever shall be,
new beginning without end.
(from Wisdom
Song)
Sanford Beck is an Anglican priest in Saskatoon's inner city, and
an instructor for the Saskatoon Theological Union.
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