Sundown at Faith Regional by Barbara Schmitz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sundown at Faith Regional by Barbara Schmitz Mark Sanders Barbara Schmitz, Sundown at Faith Regional. Montrose, CO: Pinyon Publishing, 2021. 116 pages. Paper, $20. All too often really fine poets are overlooked. This is the regrettable case for Barbara Schmitz, a Nebraska poet whose work, despite its wide-publication, has rarely been reviewed or regarded—as it so richly deserves to be—outside the boundaries of her home state. There is no accounting for that quandary other than, perhaps, the fact that American letters has so many poets and focuses are often exclusive and parochial—as arising from schools or creative writing programs or famed cliques. Indeed, Schmitz’s work may be marginalized for no other reason than her coming from a small town in northeast Nebraska. However, Schmitz’s poems are not particularly regional or provincial. Rather, universality attends her work, rooted as the poems are in spirituality and mysticism. She confronts headlong the hard topics of loss and grief, how one resolves the contradiction of living a full life while facing mortality’s dissolution; furthermore, she willfully opens doors to interior dialogues that transport us to our own consciousness and experience. Delving into the human heart and mind has long been her practice, from first books such as Lives of the Saints (Main-Traveled Roads, 1996), How to Get Out of the Body (Sandhills, 1999), and, numerous books later, Just Outside [End Page 93] (Sandhills, 2019) and, most recently, Sundown at Faith Regional. Readers may be curious to know she studied with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute, as well as with John G. Neihardt, William Stafford, and Kathleen Spivack; those influences inform and resonate within her work. As for Sundown at Faith Regional, Schmitz affirms her resolute desire to stare down Death by writing poems—though “No one wants to read them / when they sail down / from the tower where / Death has flung them” (“Lamentation” 1). Staring down death, however, means we make account of our childhoods, of our growing up, “looking to our souls for answers / forgetting we had bodies” (“Pain” 8). It means we may also ignore mortality’s approach: We didn’t know we were young we were gorgeousWe didn’t believe in Time’s riverWe didn’t know about gathering rosebuds (“Don’t We Look Good in the Pictures No One Took” 19) The allusion to Herrick’s poem is noteworthy; virgins—and everyone else—should make much of time because it passes, as a second does, so quickly. The book guides us past youth to adulthood and old age where heart medicine keeps a husband alive to “waltz through his days / like the amazing young man / I met in college” (“Heart Medicine” 26). The reader travels down a “bumpy country highway” to be passed by youths in a hurry, “grinning and waving” (“The Road” 27). What is the hurry about? Are they waving goodbye to old age or to themselves? Every day is like winter’s solstice, “like New Year’s says Husband / on the shortest day / longest night” as “leaky hearts keep time / in this breathe-breathe life / we’ve come to” (“Winter Solstice” 51). Schmitz’s Sundown at Faith Regional, serious subject matter notwithstanding, imparts unmistakable optimism. Even though the clock ticks and we get older, the universe is a holy place where [End Page 94] prayer and meditation belong, where love remains: “I believe in young love that’s stupid and naïve and / learns to grow big and old and patient and kind,” “I believe we are lucky” (“I Believe” 87–88). Mark Sanders Stephen F. Austin State University Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association