In his collection of verse, Let Us Be Silent Here, the highly regarded Canadian poet John B. Lee recounts an eighteen-day journey he made in the spring of 2011 to Israel and Jordan. He ventures to a prismatic holy land, "a thus-imagined universe," conceived in terms of Biblical majesties and saints but peopled today by more earthbound beings. Whether beneath a sycamore near Capernaum or describing the almost ineluctable feeling of bobbing in the Dead Sea, Lee evokes at once light and darkness, the uplifted and the fallen as he recounts his visit. He is at once an innocent abroad and a keen observer of the disconnect between idealism and reality. In this series of meditations, Lee deploys an accomplished poet's gift for capturing transcendent meaning in the shards of everyday life. Lee eloquently searches for Truth, rooted in scripture or in reality, in the heavens or on earth, though he realizes that it is found somewhere between them. His verse acknowledges the cruelty of human foibles that sends idealism crashing against

that last huzza, the one
you might hear
as the truest truth
in all the most
lasting and honest language
of history.
                                                

At issue is the search for meaning even when the ultimate truth, our mortality, would seem to ridicule the very possibility of significance in temporal existence. Following his wanderings in a sacred place where people, not the Divine, preside, Lee nobly and lyrically conducts and contemplates his investigations.

Sacred Turf

In The War of Brooms, set in the Church of the Nativity, Lee depicts the ungodly rivalry of priests wielding brooms as weapons in a holy war against the brothers of another sect. The poet reflects on the irony of each group vying for the glory of heaven by claiming contested turf. Of this, the poet comments pithily:

my uncle
in the north Atlantic
dropping the empty casket
of his best friend
into the dark chill
of those war-torn waters
lost his faith
for less than this
                                                

Lee proceeds to consider territoriality in a broader context, the conflict between Israeli and Arabs. In Linen and Wool, the poet grieves for this "two-mothered earth," Israel/Palestine and positions the conflict in terms of the Biblical injunction against donning a garment made of both wool and linen (shatnez) — what the Israeli poet Yehuda Amihai, who he greatly admires (along with the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish), calls "the linsey-woolsey of our being together…" One does not wish for anyone to accept the fatalistic implication of this view, that there is no solution to the conflict but a non-solution: To rent the garment leaves two unacceptable parts of an intolerable whole.

The Beauty of the Mundane

Lee distinguishes himself as a poet of note both through his skillfulness in language and acuity and also in his capacity for insight. In various poems that record the more mundane aspects of his travels, he finds meaning and grace, even in the gauche. In Riding a Camel at Wadi Rum, after describing a most uncouth dromedary, he confers on the camel almost cosmic meaning.

but what a lovely thing
to watch
the gentle plushness
of a camel's foot

to see
the ghost of where we were
appearing in our wake
like thread draw
from beneath a dream.
                                                

Similarly, Lee's ability to seize the sensual is estimable, as in Making Love in the Holy Land where he writes:

the spirit bone bent like a willow
seeking the bloom of waves
on the endless weeping of an ever-fragrant sea
ah Solomon—you with your
spiced wine, your lilies
and myrrh
feeding in the closed garden
on pomegranate and pleasant fruits
with your hand
like the shadow of fire

you were here with me
as I spoke from sleep
the seal of ash upon my arm
in vanishing darkness
I embrace my love with an ochre palm
                                                

At times John B. Lee nimbly conveys surprising irony, especially in the Jordan poems, which contrasts with the dream-like tone of his soulful wanderings amidst ruins in Israel.

Matters of the Soul

But matters of the soul are never far from the essence of Lee's poems in Let Us Be Silent Here. The earnestness of his meditations is profound, as in Wishful, which reflects on his experience at the Western Wall.

as now
in the throng
of devotion
with black-clad men
nodding at the wall

I wish I weren't
so full of doubt

the paltry sorrow of my palm
one lifeline's dark caress
in this, I feel the wish of souls

my hand
upon the fragile mortar
of such deep belief

I hear a language
that I cannot speak
                                                

And concerning matters of faith, John B. Lee readily grasps the universal message of the Holocaust in his poem, A Sadder Music: meditation on Yad Vashem,

oh reverent grief
that war is done
those lives
have lined the earth with bones
like rootwork of a thousand-thousand-thousand
wind-broken trees

the soul of man
grimes over
like a lamp of oil
and shame shines through
the tainted light we touch
that touches all.
                                                

The reader leaves the poem burdened by the classic dilemma of the post-Holocaust era: How can there be faith coexistent with the "tainted light" that surrounds us after humanity's ultimate fall?

Human Meaning

The human condition, a fusion of all that is light and all that is darkness, does not, in Lee's worldview, condemn us to meaninglessness. Like Camus, Lee finds redemption in the augustness of human travail, as in Night Sky Over Jerusalem where he writes:

the closest I will ever come
to seeing
through the eyes
of the Messiah
this mask of stars
this moon
pale as a sickly child
and in the daylight
blue heaven blooms
with those invisible
constellations
subsumed by the sun
                                                

There, in Jerusalem, peering into the nocturnal sky of the eternal city where the polarity between doubt and belief beguiles, Lee finds meaning

pull the bow on the arrow of time
from nock to tip
at this motionless moment
the quiver is full
as a clutch of ornamental reeds
and the one wound I make is doubt
and the other
pure belief, and I feel
in the presence of placeless place
and in the absence of timeless time
a common faith
in the sorrowful joy
of letting the arrow sing.
                                                

Let Us Be Silent Here is a highly laudable contemplation of this world where "blue heaven blooms" in the sunlight, which masks the stars and their constellations, the interface of what is known and what might be. Lee's poems resonate with transcendence. The collection chronicles the existential probing of a poetic spirit as he moves across a landscape that is both mythic and true.

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Yosef Gotlieb, a poet and novelist who resides outside of Jerusalem, is the author, most recently, of Rise, A Novel of Contemporary Israel.