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The Mythic and the True:
Poetic Contemplations on a Visit to Israel and Jordan

A review of John B. Lee's Let Us Be Silent Here
by
Yosef Gotlieb

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 meaningless. 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.

-------------------------

Yosef Gotlieb, a poet and novelist who resides outside of Jerusalem, is the author, most recently, of Rise, A Novel of Contemporary Israel. His blog, Issues of the Day, appears on his website at www.ysgotlieb.net.

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