Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole Madeleine Mysko (bio) Kathleen O'Toole . Meanwhile: Poems by Kathleen O'Toole. David Robert Books. In Kathleen O'Toole's Meanwhile, the title poem appears late. The reader who has attended straight through to that point will find a revelation in store: "Meanwhile" doesn't seem to illuminate the entire collection. Rather it is the other way around. Upon arrival at the title poem—wherein the speaker opens her copy of Yeats' Collected and finds the photograph she has saved of her own mother's diseased heart, marked as it is by the cardiologist's pen—the reader has been prepared by the dedicated practice of the poems that preceded it. The "meanwhile" in O'Toole's work is ordinary time, a poetic space in which she presents herself, open to what comes. Her "meanwhile" is reminiscent of W. H. Auden's "the time being," which he reminds us is "the most trying time of all," wherein "the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing," no matter the flatness of the everyday, its sense of loss, its unmistakable brokenness (For the Time Being). O'Toole practices her scales of rejoicing continually. Given her long careers in community organizing, writing, and teaching—and given her spiritual profession as a Benedictine oblate—her practice yields work not easily categorized. It resists separation into groups of poems one might characterize as nature poems, or political or "religious" poems. In Meanwhile, a poem is just as likely to emerge from a conversation about politics with a cab driver from Sierra Leone ("April is National Poetry Month"), as it is to emerge from a visit to the museum ("Opening: O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe"). Likewise, the same habit of contemplation that is exerted on the discovery of the mother's heart in "Meanwhile" is also exerted on a news piece about the death of a man who flew on the Enola Gay ("Reading Obituaries"). Again and again these ordinary moments within the meanwhile give occasion to accomplished poems in a range of styles, some worked out in traditional forms and others decidedly more free. But one [End Page 160] after the other they seem cut from the same cloth, one poet still at work on the same project-a determined openness to the holy. In an earlier chapbook, Practice, O'Toole refers to the spiritual discipline of the Benedictines. Benedictine oblates live and work outside the monastery, where they are free to marry and tend to their own families, and where they are continually at work translating the Rule of Benedict to the everyday world. Over the years, O'Toole has applied that discipline to her work as poet. Thus it is that the poems from the chapbook seem at home in the larger collection, their accomplishments a matter of course. In "The Luminous World," while attending Mass during Advent—that time of year when the light is going—the poet listens as a blind cantor sings "of brightness in the coming / of the Lord" and contemplates her own habit: I find that year to year I hoardmore illumination to store for sunless days,recording gradations of luster and shadowcalibrating brilliance. The middle stanza of this poem becomes painterly, images of remembered light thickly laid, and it concludes with a flight out of Brussels during winter: "slow / motion sunset before us, the dark diagonal of night / behind." Even as the plane enters the airspace of frozen Manhattan, the present moment seems suspended in a rich, crimson going-down of the sun. But the final stanza returns to the meanwhile, wherein the blind cantor sings, and wherein Milton is recalled, "painting his bright stones of desire." Where, O'Toole wonders, would she find grace "without the luminous world"? The allusion to Milton here is more than humble nod, more than thanks for the gift of sight with which to paint imagery praising natural beauty. Rather it is O'Toole's exhalation of gratitude for the gift of the luminous world itself. In the tradition of Christian poets like Milton-but without the direct address of conventional Christian prayer—O'Toole places herself in the presence of...