Book Review: The Diener: Poems

Abstract

Diener: Poems. By Martha Serpas. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. 78 pp. $17.95 (paper).Martha Serpas's new poetry book, draws on a pastoral tradition that associates obligations of Christian with caring for flocks in pastures. This tradition originated in Bible, which construed pastor according to its Latin definition; pastor originally meant or who provided food. When prophet Jeremiah declares, I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and (Jer. 3:15 KJV), he makes use of ancient association of and shepherd. As if fulfilling Jeremiah's promise about pastors, Jesus in John's Gospel assumes role of the good shepherd who feeds his flocks with spiritual understanding and giveth his life for sheep (John 10:11 KJV). Having worked as a hospital chaplain, Serpas gravitates to this pastoral tradition, and as an environmental activist she stresses importance of actual pastures-and of natural world in general-that must be kept healthy to feed flocks.Serpas s book begins with an introductory poem, The Diener, which focuses on related concepts of health and wholeness, and way an individual's body, like world's body, is an ecosystem in which different parts must work together as a whole for there to be health. As director of a morgue, Serpas s is all too familiar, with parts breaking down and wholes dying and decomposing. If one endorses Serpas's proposition that God's image is (p. 1), which she asserts before giving a catalog of body parts, one should also endorse ideal of composite whole. We like to see ourselves as whole, she writes, diener piling legs on a cot / despite pruned artery, tied and cut (p. 1). Like Frost counseling his readers to drink and be whole beyond confusion with a makeshift communion goblet like Grail at end of Directive, Serpas throughout Diener directs those who find their lives in confusing fragments to pursue ideal of wholeness. At times, her urge to counsel makes her didactic. Education is answer / to our social woes, she says at start of Pearl Snap (p. 10), a poem drawing on her experiences as a hospital chaplain. Poems such as Badlands, in which a patient tattooed with wolves boasts he is an atheist, or Asperges, in which a nurses washes a dead baby boy whose green skin sloughs off // like bruised fruit skins (pp. …