Lunar Insistence V. The Pragmatic Poet: The High Rise Show Down
A Review of Kathleen Bryce Niles’ Liturgies of the Moon
by Jessica Mason McFadden
As a lifelong student, admirer, and lover of the moon, I was not at all surprised to learn that the moon was central to Kathleen Bryce Niles’ latest collection of poems. I didn’t realize how central until I read part of the collection a few months prior to its publication and offered suggestions for lovable and laughable titles, the best of which was the one she chose. Liturgies of The Moon is what you would find in your favorite schoolmarm librarian’s personal collection: Bryce Niles writes like a pagan nun, with an old school pointer for a tongue and a chalkboard sky, cleanly swiped but just a little runny, for a soul.
Kathleen Bryce Niles is not a sap and she isn’t in the flowery, sometimes self- and audience-deceptive, business of word mincing. She’s a wise old acre, in the best sense, and when she writes about the moon, she writes with not just a hint but an overt and honest bitterness toward the entire process of all-consuming worship, a bitterness that only a sage caught up for years with exceptional earnestness in a grander spectrum of devotional liturgies is afforded. I know Bryce Niles personally, so I know some of what that grand spectrum entails, including years dealing with the public school system, but her poems are true workingwoman’s poems and they will hit home in any person’s personal liturgical milieu. If you view her moon liturgies as a metaphor for the larger, and particularly, political state of things, her succinct booklet will be most potent.
She is tired of the trials of the moon, those that truly characterize what it means to be alive in a liturgical state, but she’s fully awake and quick as a whip in offering responses to her own lifelong liturgical love of and fascination with the moon. You can tell she’s fully involved in the role of the moon and the role of liturgy in her life, two entities that are resigned to co-existing at a considerable distance despite their deeper connection.
That recognition of an emanating spiritual connection amidst a deep and wounding worldly disconnection is the irresolvable and obvious core message of Liturgies of The Moon—one that hurts and begs for resolution. Even when Bryce Niles gives the foolish moon the proverbial paddle, numerous times, her earnestness is so overwhelming that it is always clear that she is completely for the moon and that she’ll never be done with schooling herself and others in it. Which brings me back to that Athenian quality that Bryce Niles brings to the page. She’s a teacher for life, committed for better or worse, and her poetry is instructive and instructional. That doesn’t mean we should take her narrator’s advice or obey her exhortative commands. No, never: we wouldn’t be doing our part as her readers and students if we did not question and do a bit of inquisitive dissenting.
Bryce Niles is an expert teacher-and-writer; she knows what she is doing. She knows that tough love in the form of an imperfect wisdom is not an exact science and that to teach is to cause a stir rather than to procure an exact response. The poems are intended to make us talk back rather than to provide us with answers, and they should be read all together for a high impact. The collection commands us to read it from start to finish in one short sitting (in my case, crouching), but the poems will sit (or crouch) with us longer. Reading them separately, extracting them from the collection, would be to the reader’s detriment; it would be like coming in for ten minutes of a two hour class: you cannot connect the dots without all the dots.
Coherence is made very clear. At times the coherence seems a bit overdone, but I believe that is the product of Bryce Niles’ training as an educator. Repetition is a necessity to an effective liturgy and it is also a natural side effect of moon, or any kind of, worship. There is a lot being said here that is not on the page, which truly is to Bryce Niles’ credit. Liturgies of The Moon is a conversation, not a lecture; your participation will be fostered and is required.
With a lunar insistence that might otherwise be deemed too omnipresent and oversimplified, the chapbook will cohere and lend its instrumental lesson if the reader is ready and open to it.
Kathleen Bryce Niles urges us to consider the liturgical dimension even though the poems do not directly do so. Her warm dedication to her priest, Rev. Cathy Dempsey-Sims, signals us to read not between but beyond the lines. Liturgies of The Moon is more pain than pleasure, but much of learning works according to that principle. If the moon were not a divine pleasure, the mortal pain would not be so great nor so worth it.
The book ends in the acerbic mouth of the liturgically commanded narrator who is fully in her voice, perhaps a little too much for us to trust her. In addition, the final poem, which I happened to read first, is a little too conclusive for comfort. Less reminiscent and vulnerable, while more shielding against the moon’s beauty and its inextricable tie to memory than ever, Bryce Niles brings us into contact with the role that the moon and other glorious natural phenomena play in our final hours of life. They are present with us when we face death, yet we push them away to protect ourselves. But do we truly protect ourselves in doing so? Her final poem begs this, when she ponders the distant and enduring moon as she steels herself in order to leave it behind, envying that it will “go on and on / making friends and enemies / shining bright / and disappearing into itself.”
She asks and then answers herself, at the book’s close, not as the immaculate speaker from above, but as the feeble and exhausted but committed reader of its immaculate silence:
will it miss me
will it remember the child
and the old woman
probably not
At first, I thought it was the saddest ending to a book of poems I had ever read. I shouted, “Aw, come on” aloud, leaping off the park bench on which I was perched. It reminded me of how I felt when I first watched Johnny Cash’s cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” The power of a person who is intimate with death holding a communicative instrument cannot be surpassed. That video, I watched dozens of times. I can only imagine this poem will have a similar effect on some readers. Like Cash in “Hurt,” Kathleen Bryce Niles is ready to cut to the chase, to leave off the coating, and give us an honest word: probably not.
In my dismay, I did not want to accept the triumph of what seemed existentialism’s win over the hope sprung from a figure that unites, and sometimes divides, us all. Still in my dismay but on second reading, I laughed. I realized that Bryce Niles was doing something galling, on purpose. She was ending with instigation, something to provoke her reader. And it worked. I was readerly putty in her writerly hands.
She brought out the old hag to put a lid on all the vexing dreams and in doing so gave us a death-bed last line. Few can take as mundane a phrase as “probably not” and knock us on the side of the head with it with that kind of impact. Death can. Kathleen Bryce Niles can. Liturgies of The Moon will. For our sakes, I hope there are more liturgies where this fine little book of poems came from.