Читать книгу Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) - Zachary Welter Czaia - Страница 5

How does a poet invite readers into a new collection of poems? And how does a person writing a foreword tell readers to come into this book, stay for a while, get to know this particular narrator? Zach Czaia’s first book, Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) begins with flesh, and accidents, with memory and touch. We begin inside ordinary life, carefully observed and remembered, then quickly we are considering Paul from the Bible, and just as quickly, Charon the Boatman, and Dante, and then Father X—with this wrenching image: “always Father X with his breath in the morning,/like an animal had lain overnight in his mouth and died/and death poured out of his mouth along with the gospel.”

We meet a narrator who’s so sharp, so observant, and so willing to reveal his vulnerabilities. In love, he stands in his bath towel, in front of the one he loves, and thinks: “I don’t want to die yet./ I don’t want to cry around you./ I don’t want to be a baby./ I want a baby’s heart and skin but not his tears./I press my face up to yours/and tremble.” This moves me. In its tenderness, it moves me, but also I was surprised to arrive at these lines, and I love when a poet surprises me, makes me see the world differently for a moment.

In this collection Zach Czaia achieves what we hope for as readers of poetry—that we can enter the book and want to stay, that we want to know what else this poet has seen and heard, learned and judged, read and dreamed. We turn the page and see his brilliant poems about his life as a teacher of high school students, see such honesty and true reflection about what it means to try to truly engage with these young people, what it means to stay authentic inside the force fields of students’ hopes and fears, their suffering, their judgements about school and books and their lives and their teacher, whether in Minneapolis or Belize. In his poem, “Memory From My Year of Substitute Teaching in Minneapolis Public,” Czaia writes: “They started throwing dictionaries./ I said, thinking it a good thing to say,/When I taught in Belize, my students had/little to nothing but they appreciated their education./My students in Minneapolis did not appreciate/being compared to Belizeans. Some sucked their teeth./More dictionaries were thrown./There is no satisfying conclusion to this story. . .”

He writes poems about how we seek and reject wisdom, about Blake and tigers, and God’s power, about Bible stories and their hold on some of us, and about Milton and Auden, about corruption and suffering in his church, and about priests and teachers, truths and cover-ups. He writes about family and about deep, true, longed-for love.

So, this first book has a kind of abundance. Sometimes it is easy to move from poem to poem, sometimes not. We might be slowed down in our reading by a remarkable image, or because we are watching a narrator really working to understand these lives we have been given. This new poet enters the national conversations now; his work will be read and his work will be remembered for its beauty on the page, its acute examinations of power—in families, in schools, in biblical stories, in churches—in its exploration of what it means to love with honor, and what it means to judge and to forgive. In the final poem of the book our poet writes: “I want to be a true poem. . .I want my memories to father forth my manhood, whatever that is, young as it is.”

This book is full of true poems, written by a truthful, wonderfully gifted poet. How fortunate we are to watch Zach Czaia examine and consider what a human life can mean, can be, how fortunate to have his voice join the great and abiding river of poets’ voices.

Deborah Keenan

Professor in the MFA Program at Hamline University

Poet, author of eleven collections—most recently, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, Milkweed Editions; From Tiger to Prayer, a book of writing ideas, broadcraft press; and, so she had the world, Red Bird Chapbooks Press.