Christopher Wiebe reviews A Liturgy for Stones in Journal of Mennonite Studies  22: 272-73.

David Wright's second collection of poems, A Liturgy for Stones, ends with a poem about the forces that would make poetry irrelevant by dictating what it can and cannot address. "Poems Should Not Be" suggests that each poem is a workshop where, in the act of fitting words together and exerting pressure on disparate ideas, discoveries are made. Poetry, in other words, is a way of finding what you didn't know you were looking for. "If poetry matters," Wright said in a recent interview, "it matters because it sensually persists in raising our level of suspicion that mystery and juxtaposition linger nearer to the truth than do statistics and taxonomies." The poems in A Liturgy for Stones, often beginning in a flash of insight and wriggling towards a new understanding, give the reader a palpable sense of that poetic discovery and reveal, in the process, a powerful literary imagination.

Currently teaching literature and writing at Wheaton College, Illinois, Wright has a poetic voice that is self-aware yet uncluttered, almost casual. A number of his poems have been included in Ann Hostetler's important new anthology of North American Mennonite writing, A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (2003); his first collection of poems was Lines from the Provinces (2000). While many of the poems in A Liturgy for Stones have appeared previously in literary journals and magazines like The Mennonite, Wright has crafted a cohesive whole-- "the mason's hands marry stones / to the particular stones he finds" (13). Indeed, there is a wonderful abundance of expression on display in this collection, from narrative poems with long and breathless lines to those whose sharply sketched forms are grounded in rhythm and repetition. Wright has a knack for forging striking images--"syllables arching on lips like sparks"--as well as a lovely feel for when to break a line or, as in "Tending Gardens," when to leave it dangling poignantly over the edge of a stanza.

In the first of five sections, the poems challenge habits of seeing and wrestle wonder from the conventional. A small silver fish shatters the quiet naturalism of autumn leaves floating on a river; a church janitor tries to clean the scuff marks from the bottom of the baptismal tank (thereby echoing the Anabaptists recognition of the reality of flour and yeast in the communion bread). In "Looking at Roadside Bluestem Before Leaving Decatur," indigenous "weeds" rise irrepressible from trash downwind from a factory: "We want to stay where bluestem roots, gnarled as human nerves, / prosper under blackest dirt, / refuse to wither during winter, / drink from sources purer than the air." Many of these poems are very particularly rooted in Wright's home state of Illinois, and bear the influence of Wendell Berry's writings on ecology and rural community.

The collection's second section is more elegiac in tone--"God's grammar is not far from our tongues" and the third is a group of poems filled with spiritual longing that respond antiphonally to biblical passages. The short poem, "Lydia's Song," illumines a woman briefly mentioned in Acts 16:14:

A heart opens,
        unfolds like a bolt of fine purple cloth.

And there is God,
        wrapped in the body's best linen,
        tangled tight within a woman's woven heart,
        stretched wide to meet the threadbare world.

The fourth section, "A Liturgy for Stones," acts as the collections centre of gravity. An eight part sequence meditating on Luke 19:40 ("He answered, 'I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out'"), it borrows from the liturgical traditions of Judaism and Christianity, and the epic, timeless exhortations of the Psalms and Prophets. . . . Many critics have identified the risk of cliche and 'churchified language' that Christian poets run when writing about spiritual experience. Wright smelts something of his own our of these mystical registers, crafting a marvelously tactile voice that nonetheless remains elusive and otherworldly. The collection concludes with a whimsical, playful, fifth grouping of poems, including "Sunday Afternoon in the Universe," in which a man making love ricochets from worries about a frail grandmother to metaphysical speculations on the fabric of the cosmos.

Spirited and teeming with ideas, Wright's A Liturgy for Stones demonstrates how poetry can be an engaged and vital space. His is a compelling emerging voice that deserves to be listened to attentively and with care.

Christopher Wiebe
Ottawa, Ontario

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