Review of Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds
Eds. Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce
Bloodaxe, 2007. 978-1-85224-766-9
Bloodaxe do a good job of presenting lesser known poets packaged in attractive covers, and there are just over 100 poets represented in this small book, with some of them having more than one poem, notably Mary Oliver, Rumi, Jane Kenyon, Rilke, Galway Kinnell, William Blake and Wendell Berry. While these names are well anthologized, I came across several lesser known poets, such as Imtiaz Dharker, Lal Ded, Antonio Machado, Shinkichi Takahashi and Fiona Farrell. The editors take a global approach to nourishing the soul and it works well.
Poetry needs to give the reader new ways of saying what he or she only grasps at—those airy thoughts that float across the brain like clouds. Lines of great poetry give us tools for articulating our thoughts, and I found several in this collection.
Many of the poems start in the void that is the starved mind. Jaan Kaplinski, in “Summers and Springs” tells us:
God has left us: I felt this clearly
Loosening the earth around a rhubarb plant.
All the poems transcend the void and show us how to find nourishment for the soul, sometimes through nature or through people. William Stafford, in “How to regain Your Soul,” shows us the way of nature:
…Your soul pulls toward the canyon
and then shines back through the white wings to be you again.
On the other hand, Robert Bly finds soul in the quotidian, the ordinary lives of people. In “The Third Body,” he describes contentment:
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
At this moment to be older, or younger, or born
In any other nation, or any other time, or any other place.
The poets reminds us to sit down and take time to contemplate life and death and thus achieve the stillness of the soul that we all need. The poems are indeed a feast for the starved minds who come to them, and because they’re short, one can graze as at a buffet.
Elaine Oswald, June 2011
