Everything is Shining By Jan David Madsen, reviewed by Emily Pittman Newberry

Everything is Shining By Jan David Madsen

Lulu, 2016, 66 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1329812314
Available at https://www.lulu.com/
Author website: https://zestymumbles.com/

Reviewed by Emily Pittman Newberry

When Carolyn Martin sent out a call for poets to write reviews of books, I scanned the list of books on the OPA website and was drawn to Everything is Shining just by the sound of the title. As I read it through the first two times, I loved many of the poems.

The book opens with some intriguing pieces. “Dust To Dust” is a nicely done meditation on the concept of no thing. No thing is the belief in a deeper reality that is neither what we think of as nothing nor made up of stuff. It is more real than the material world around us. The poem begins, Ask when I first knew that everything/was shining, all at once, like the sun … and ends, That it is the dust in which I Am/ dancing forever. This line – with the capitalized I Am – leaves us with the mystery of whom is being referred to: the speaker or pure Beingness, the nonmaterial world out of which we are all made.

In “Ever Again,” we are treated to a prose poem that is interspersed with a more traditionally formatted, three-stanza poem. In the prose sections the speaker is present with his internal state. The poetry weaves in the felt and seen world around him. The single word Silence at the end invited me to be present with internal and external physical experiences in a way that transcends the boundary we normally perceive as solid.

In addition, this poem repeats words from an earlier poem, “That Day,” which describes a similar experience, but one that is not exactly the same. The words of a saint, “Ever Again” says, retrieved and read many, many times. In “That Day” the saint’s words appear as a pantomime: the stream seems to mummer the words of the saint. In “Ever Again” these same words peek through worn-thin papers to speak of this dissolving leap into reality from the depth of silence beneath. I found this intermixing and repetition to be almost a conversation between the two poems. It drew me in and motivated me to re-read both.

Other poems use sweet language to engage the reader. In “Mist,” the speaker says, Let me evaporate/ like the dew on the leaves, and “Moment In A Meadow” opens with Bright sun dappling green-dance in the trees.

Given how much I liked many of the poems, others left me wishing they had been reworked. For example, “A Real Poser” begins with a very dark blind and the very bright lamp. Then in the third and fourth stanzas the speaker throws out a series of questions: What is it?/Where is this place?/Is it day or night? and What’s going on?/Is it some kind of trick?/An illusion? He then answers, Yes, yes it is! And, of course, Everyone is in on it! Here we are spoon fed the questions and the answers are handed to us on a silver platter.

The poem “Draw” does the same thing. It begins with two stanzas in which the speaker asks to be literally drawn on paper, ending with the poetic, The surface upon which I am drawn is still upon a blank and empty page. Then the poem ends with a line of questions in which the speaker again tells us the answers we are to reach rather than showing them poetically.

I hope this author keeps writing and that we will see more from him with poems like “Dust To Dust,” “Ever Again,” “Mist,” and “Moment In A Meadow.”

 

Reviewer’s Bio:

Emily Pittman Newberry is a performance poet living in Portland, Oregon. Her writing explores the challenges of living as spiritual beings in a human world.  OneSpirit Press published her first full book of poetry, Butterfly A Rose, and a chapbook, Nature Speaking, Naturally, now used in art therapy classes for elders. She wrote poetry for the artist’s book Water by Shu-Ju Wang. Her work has appeared in journals such as VoiceCatcher, The Tishman Review, and Kind Of A Hurricane Press. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. Her website is www.butterflyarose.com

 

 

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