Christal
Cooper
Excerpts
given copyright privilege by White Pine
Press.
The
Beggar, The Spiritualist, & The Seeker
*A Book Analysis On Joan
Murray’s
Swimming
For the Ark New & Selected Poems 1990-2015
White Pine Press published Joan
Murray’s fifth poetry collection Swimming For The Ark New And Selected Poems
1990-2015 on March 3, 2015.
Swimming for the Ark is the
first book to be published by White Pine Press’s new Distinguished Poets Series
funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Murray has also written four
other poetry collections: The
Same Water (Wesleyan)
which earned her the Wesleyan New Poets Series Competition; Looking
for the Parade (W.W. Norton & Company), which was chosen by
Robert Bly as the winner of the National
Poetry Series Open Competition; Queen of the Mist (Beacon
Press), which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates as the runner up for a Poetry
Society American award, and earned Murray her first Broadway commission; and, Dancing
on the Edge (Beacon Press).
She has
also edited three poetry anthologies:
Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times (Beacon Press), Poems
to Live by in Troubling Times (Beacon Press), and The
Pushcart Book of Poetry: the Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize (Pushcart
Press).
Swimming
For The Ark New & Selected Poems 1990-2015, 203
pages, is divided into five sections: from each of her four poetry collections,
and “New Poems,” the first section
in the book.
There
are three dominant themes in this collection:
that of the beggar, the spiritual, and the seeker.
The
beggar is defined as a person or creature that has exceeded all resources and
capabilities of acquiring something that is necessary for physical life. The beggar, in the process of begging, also
makes it understood that he, she, or it will never be able to return the favor,
the gift, nor the payment.
Murray
uses spiritual symbolism throughout the collection to impact her poems: images of Jesus, Peter, Mother Mary, Thomas,
scenes from parables Jesus told, and other spiritual elements are detected
throughout her poetry. In many of the
poems the speaker of the poem is a little girl who portrays herself and her
mother as the Mother Mary.
Finally ingrained in all of humanity regardless if we are focused on begging for food
or for spiritual awakening – there is the seeker in all of us, the seeker of a
quest – the drive to find and discover something we don’t have and can not be
granted by physical means such as food, clothing or shelter.
At
first I, as the reader, was only focusing on the “beggar” aspect of these poems
but felt disjointed. There was also
spirituality and a quest theme in these poems that could not be denied.
In “What Was Expected” a woman encounters
opossum – which in this poem is the beggar – begging the woman for food. The woman experiences a sense of god-like power
by comparing herself to Jesus’s disciple Peter. She tries to practice her god-like power and
convince herself that she could turn this opossum into a cat. She opens the door, only to have the opossum
back away in fear, abandoning the cat’s bowl of food. She describes the opossum as a beggar,
inserting even more spiritual metaphors- that of comparing the opossum to baby
Jesus.
because he guessed, dumb beggar, I wouldn’t
pursue him,
only leave him to his hunger and the dicey
scraps of winter
as the stars did in December when he came.
The
beggar in “The Gypsy Child” is a mouse the reader is warned to stay away
from, similar to the pig that Christ warned us to stay away from, and a warning
of what would happen if we went near the pig – it would be like throwing out
precious pearls into the swine. In
this poem the pig is the mouse and the pearls are the sugar.
There
is a twist – the speaker of the poem becomes the predator to the beggar by
condemning the mouse to death by allowing it to gorge on the sugar.
Give the mouse the run of your house
and it will beat a path to your bag of sugar
and gorge itself with a happiness that
could move you to tears, which is what
I gave it, right there –with my fingers
in the mess it had left with me.
The woman
regrets the way she treated the mouse and feels guilty for not having sympathy
for the beggar mouse, only to realize that she is the beggar in spiritual need.
And now I’m left with what I’ve lost –
the simple capacity to be stirred by simple
things
The
woman deems the humanity problem is not due to the amount of food begged for or
the amount of good granted but the human race loosing the ability to feel
surprised with each oncoming action.
Maybe sympathy comes best
when it’s got some element of surprise to it-
like when you stop on 14th street and
reach
for your wallet the first time the Gypsy child
grabs your arm and tells you she’s hungry.
But the next time, though she’s probably
just as hungry, which may be
considerably or not at all,
you push her hand away
In the
spiritual world we as humanity are all beggars praying to God, the One who has
lost the element of surprise, a gift He’s bestowed upon humanity, a gift that
we are begging God to take back.
In “Just Taste Them” the speaker of the
poem compares seven cheeses to the seven sacraments, the tasting of these cheeses
to Communion, and chanting to the Catholic communion prayer.
In the
closing of the poem the speaker identifies her father as a stranger of a god,
who looks into the refrigerator wondering at these cheesey sacraments and what
they are there for. It is here that the
old adage that daughters view god the way they view their father is true.
and would come upon those odd-named things
and wonder what they were doing there –
as if they’d come from somewhere very far away-
the food of some strangers
or maybe their gods
In “The Gardener’s Wife” the speaker identifies
her father as a gardener and a nurturer, two traits that he shares with God,
but those traits are lost the moment God brings the gardener and the gardener’s
wife into existence.
Perhaps God is Dr. Frankenstein and we are the monsters – or is it the other way around?
Perhaps God is Dr. Frankenstein and we are the monsters – or is it the other way around?
And every weekend he tended it by hand,
he put up twigs and twine, he weeded, watered,
the way God must have done before he brought in
the gardener and the gardener’s wife
and everything went wrong.
In “The Precarious Nest” God the father is
depicted as a neglectful father which is universal to all of humanity – at one
point or another every human being has felt neglected by God. By sharing this universal truth there is hope
and loss all at the same time.
Whatever we prayed to once
is there outside the porch panes, still
answering or
ignoring our prayers.
There is always some weed that the garden loves.
In “Swimming For The Ark” the speaker
compares her mother to the Virgin Mary.
And my mother closed herself
into the phone booth like the Virgin ascending
to heaven
In “Lifeline” the speaker of the poem
compares herself to the Mother Mary with elements of being a savior to the
sinful turtle, another beggar.
and there I knelt
like the Madonna at the manger
on a rock big enough to sacrifice anything on,
and I set the turtle down and mumbled
something like “live long and prosper,”
to which it must have said “amen”
before I let it go.
In “Fiat” the speaker of the poem is the
Virgin Mary and the God the creator all in one via the voice of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel and live to tell the tale.
Then – like the Virgin Mary –
I was quickened:
I got down on my knees
and spread two lengths of pattern stock
and began to sketch a shape:
I rounded it and tapered it,
added and erased
-till I knew it would accommodate my size.
In “Debriefing” the speaker of the poem
compares herself to Thomas, the disciple who doubted Jesus and his resurrection
and had to touch his side before he was convinced.
-until a trio of surgeons
began to probe my torso (maybe looking for a
gash
to put their hands in – so they could prove, as
in the gospel,
that I truly was alive.
In “The Same Water” one questions why he
or she should believe in anything, when, regardless of what we believe, we all
experience “The Same Water?”
Sooner or later each kid who fishes
in uneventful water
where the bob only bobs and is not pulled under
will
imagine the sameness of heaven
and by lunchtime will realize in his boredom
that all water converges
and
must be shared by everyone.
In
these poems there are two dominant figures, both seekers and both women on
opposite sides of the globe, one from South Africa and the other in Niagara
Falls who experience her own individual water.
The
woman from South Africa is seeking water on behalf of the children in her village who are dying of thirst. This is the physical nourishment.
After a year drought,
when one child in three is at risk of death,
she returns from a distant well,
carrying water on her head.
The
other is Annie Edson Taylor who went over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel for something
outside the physical realm: to experience a spiritual awakening or to
experience god-like qualities, that of creation?
Niagara! - over me – under me!-
I spilled into it from every pore,
lost myself
in the
blackness of its roar.
Something
opened- grew wide- and tore-
till
every part of me was new:
Brain. Eyes.
Tongue
--down
to the wet soles in my shoes.
I took
my measure, checked my sex
and,
pleased with what I’d made,
I
slapped my back between the blades
and
took a deep breath
of
consciousness.
Regardless
of where we are at in our life - that of being a beggar, spiritualist, or a
seeker-- Joan Murray’s book Swimming For the Ark speaks to the
humanity within all of us, and is a testament that we are all in the same water, no
matter how different our circumstances may be.
PHOTO DESCRIPTION &
COPYRIGHT INFO
1.
White
Pine Press logo
2.
Swimming for the Ark jacket cover
3.
Joan
Murray, image on back jacket cover.
Copyright
granted by White Pine Press
4.
The Same
Water
jacket cover
5.
Looking
for the Parade
and Robert Bly (Public Domain)
6.
Queen of
the Mist and Joyce Carol Oats (Fair
Use)
7.
Dancing On
the Edge
8.
Poems to
Live By
In
Uncertain Times jacket cover
9.
Poems to
Live By
In
Troubling Times jacket cover
10.
The
Pushcart Book of Poetry: the Best Poems
from 30 Years of Pushcart Prize jacket cover
11.
Full
Jacket cover of SWIMMING FOR THE ARK
12.
Painting,
Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melons
Attributed
to Murillo Estaban
Public
Domain
13.
First Communion in 1896 by Pablo
Picasso
Public
Domain
14
The Seeker
Attributed
to Christal Rice Cooper
Copyright
granted by Christal Rice Cooper
15
Joan
Murray, image on back jacket cover.
Copyright
granted by White Pine Press
16
Opossum
Sleeping Virginia opossum with
babies in her relaxed pouch
Public
Domain
17
Joseph,
Mary, and Baby Jesus from The History Channel’s “The Bible” Episode 3
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law
18
White
mouse eating birthday cake
Public
Domain
19
John
Thomas Peele “Feeding the Pets”
Public
Domain
20.
“The Dead Mouse” by Louise Leopold Bolly
I 1793
Public
Domain
21.
The
Beggar Girl
CCASA
2.0 and Fair Use Under the Untied States Copyright Law
22.
types
of cheeses from cheese tasting party
Public
Domain
23.
7
sacraments
Public
Domain
24.
vintage
of father at the refrigerator
Public
Domain
25
Vintage
of Adam and Eve
Fair
Use Under the United States Copyright Law.
26.
Jimson Weed by Georgia O’Keefe
Painted
in 1936
Photographed
by Zambonia on September 29, 2011
Public
Domain
27.
Mother
Mary in the Phone Booth.
Photo
shopped of two images , both Fair Use, by Christal Rice Cooper
28.
Little
girl pretending to be Mother Mary with the turtle.
Four
images (all Fair Use ad Public Domain) photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper
29.
Annie
Edson Taylor
Public
Domain
30.
The Incredulity of
Thomas
painting by Caravaggio
Public
Domain
31.
A view
of the American, Bridal Veil and Horseshoe Falls from the Presidential Suite of
the Sheraton Fallsview Hotel, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
Public
Domain
32.
Lithograph
Original Antique Postcard from the 1930s and 1940s
Attributed
to Kent Cottrell, born in 1887
Public
Domain
33.
Annie
in the barrel – her head is visible
Public
Domain
34.
Annie
after her successful trip over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Public
Domain
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