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A Modern Mystic The Book of Madness and Love by Arthur L. Clements. Bordighera Inc., Boca Raton, Florida, 2000. Paperback, 76 pages, $10. One of the many paradoxes of mystical experience is that those who talk about it say it cannot be talked about. But from time to time expressions of mystic experience crystallize to clarify the contradictions. The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi (in Coleman Barks' translation) illuminates the paradox of experience and expression by observing, "No metaphor can say this,/but I can't stop pointing/to the beauty." And as it happens, this is exactly the spirit of Arthur Clements' The Book of Madness and Love, a collection of poems squarely and self-consciously in the tradition of world mystical literature. True to the milieu, the book's two sections seem to contradict each other. The first half tells, by conventions seemingly obligatory in writing workshops, stories of family dysfunction. Clements' lucid, accessible verse depicts painful incidents in the life of a wildly neglectful father, a crushed mother, and an emotionally ill son. It's a mad world of profound emotional suffering. It hardly resembles, on its surface, the ecstatic universe presented in the book's second half. But there is more to these first nineteen poems than what usually slinks out of the MFA programs. The lyric voice's disposition toward family and personal pain, far from gushing or blaming, is authentically redemptive -- not in any social sense, not in resignation, and not by egotistical psychological jimmying, but in true inner, human terms. Inside the madness is deep, stubborn love. "My Mad Son Helps Me into Heaven" begins, "He calls again/to say people are talking about him,/want to kill him," works its way through a harrowing conversation, and ends with: "'Dad, you're a great talker,/I always learn something from you./You've earned your way in, too.'" The word "heaven" in the title occurs neither off-handedly nor ironically. Clements is referring to that age-old sense of heaven which concerns the true inner state of a human being: Heaven and hell are the same thing, William Blake observed, and exist as one or the other according to one's primary imagination -- not fantasy -- of reality. The son's suffering contains not merely anguish, but an opportunity for the elevation of the spirit. These first poems are filled with the madness that destroys, and love that redeems. A set of four poems with the overall title "Romans In Sun and Shadow" departs to some extent from the subjects of family and friends, and offers reflections on a trip to southern Europe. The themes of the book are not lost here, as the poetic voice attends unfailingly to complexities of suffering and generosity, but the point of view is that of a tourist rather than a son or father, and there's a sense the book loses its way briefly -- if interestingly. "Straying maps the path," Rumi says. The book's voice returns to its original neighborhood in the next two poems, and ends the section finally by evoking the "good words" -- the various senses in which words can be good -- that the poet's Aunt Clara generously bestowed on him for life. The second half of The Book of Madness and Love is filled with glimpses of the love that binds everything together. The last twenty-five poems point madly to the experience that cannot be expressed, where, beyond all objectivity and common sense, the natural world discloses the beauty and unity of all existence. It's the "fiery world/of Blake and Rumi," in which a beautiful woman walks the back yard naked in the form of a deer, and to which finally, in a context of great pain, "Joy Comes Back": After a season of my anguishing over my consuming cancer, cancer consuming this body, snow, covering all life-sustaining grass, brings Joy and this renewed stillness. The amazing quality of Clements' poems is their authenticity. The experience created in these pages is not gummed and paperclipped together with casual allusions and theoretical fantasies; but instead, it is the powerful and resonant, essentially vital creation of a mind living in the universe as encountered and shaped by imagination and word. This is reality. These poems authentically reclaim the world from what Annie Dillard once called "the extortionary prices" we pay for just living here. The mad realities of Plato, Rumi and Walt Whitman permeate The Book of Madness and Love -- which is a way of saying that it crystallized not out of the raw ambition to write poems, but out of the unmistakable, sometimes offensive and usually bewildering madness of love. Those who seek in poetry the fixities and definites of familiar themes will find this verse discomfitingly cozy. But moreover, those who thirst hopefully after the sufferings and beauties of love and who recognize its paradoxes, will find here deeply affective expressions of that inexpressible leap into the unexpected worlds: There is no way to say this or to stop trying to say it. __________________________________________________ Arthur Clements was a much-loved teacher of more than thirty years at Binghamton University in New York. His knowledge of the mystical tradition in Western literature was profound, ranging from his reading in Sufism to his books The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne and Poetry of Contemplation. He won a number of awards for his poetry, including the Dylan Thomas Award, the Allen Ginsberg Award and a Poetry Center Award. His previous poetry collections include Dream of Flying (published by Endless Mountains) and Common Blessings (Lincoln Springs). He died in 2004. © Dana Wilde 2007; Xavier Review 2001. Reading Forays home The Mind Errant |