In her first full-length collection, The Book of Awe, she begins with a word--poiesis—a word that means “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before,” a word “turned over and over within its power,/untouched by power outside itself.” A poem, of course, brings into being what didn’t exist before and thus, in turn, becomes a form of “making and unmaking” our orientation to each other, to our inner and outer lives, and especially to our thinking about what meaning might possibly mean. Each poem in this book, each titled by a singular word—dominion, sanctified, charity, exile, guilt, mercy, et al—brings us to a new awareness of what our sentience must mean, if not the “awe” that forms and reforms us.
The poems in this book are dense and worth living inside for long stretches of time. They are worthy of thinking on, meditating upon, in all seriousness. Poems like "Guilt" or "Theodicy" deserve long explications in order to tease out their implications. There is a philosophical enquiry at work in Underwood's approach—investigations, parsings, interrogations pitted against the “well-arranged life” most of us have, desire, envy, or, at a minimum, believe in. Underwood—I’m never quite sure—gives us very few places to stand with certainty. Like the rainbow trout in “Transubstantiation,” maybe there is “no way to know/how many days or what kinds of skies” we’ll see or understand before we, too, are jerked up out of this “steadfast world” we have come to believe is our own or believe we deserve.
How much of “awe” is actually composed of “guilt,” “humility,” “grace,” “mercy,” grief,” or “empathy”? How much of “awe” requires “communion” or “discipline”? “I can’t give you everything I know,” Underwood says in “Gnosis,” though she calls attention to “the days our grandmothers lived/…their children coming to early harm” and to the memories grandfathers never speak out loud. We live in a world where a child dies of starvation one winter and where “the least of these” Jesus told us to care for “might hold a knife to your throat.” What, fundamentally, is awe? What kind of knowing, or gnosis, does it embrace, contain, question, or subvert? What unknowns must it allow, accept, celebrate, or grieve?
“Empathy,” a later poem in the collection, provides a moving distillation of the kind of mind at work in Underwood’s best poems, although, in truth, one could open this book to any page and find compelling, thoughtful engagements with complex, unanswerable questions and situations.
EMPATHY
If you look, the lost and found will glitter all their lessons.
In subtropical sun, lift up a cellophane of snake skin
sloughed off near the sand-pile hills of ants.
And shudder—not afraid of venom
or insects feasting on dead skin--
but to think about the itch in molting such a fragile shrug.
Touch the diamond pattern and you
touch the freedom of those born-again new scales.
Flame tree bean pods clatter in the wind
and scatter where they’ve fallen, two-feet-long and hard as bark.
You squat and gather the ones that litter up the yard
like harmless wooden swords,
amazed by tooth- and beak-marks squirrels and birds
have chewed for meager seeds.
They must have flown away with aching, giddy jaws.
The only other person in your view, the next yard over,
is a young girl on a swing. Above the fence
her blond head shows at the apex lift
of every rise she makes to break through gravity.
After school for hours every day, she swings,
silent under the jacaranda tree.
There’s something about her not quite right,
her parents and teachers and the neighbors know,
not seeing through their worry to what’s naturally her.
This afternoon, for once, infused yourself
beyond the logic of adults imagining
the prison of her flesh and mind,
wishing for what we’d wish to be normal.
Feel the pulsing shove and plunge
she feels, her hair like light around her face and skin,
the wind she flings herself into, lurching
and falling back into, that same wind touching
her which touches snakes and bugs and calling birds,
the same sunlight on every bougainvillea bloom,
on leaf and limb and vine, each sundered and apart,
yet all together rapt
with every reaching toward immensity.
Underwood’s voice tries but never quite gets past “the logic of adults.” In “Theodicy,” for instance, against the knowledge of “the Gulf’s floor bloodletting/a mile down in freezing, pressurized black,” she admits, exhausted by futility, “One foolish human at a time/will wash one gull at a time, one heron,/cradle and redeem some big-winged creature.” Even so, “Every last one is sent back to be sullied all over again,” and the cycle continues—such small, minor gestures combatting an endless and steady pouring-forth of desecration we may, in the end, be hopeless to affect in any meaningful way. Like the young girl in “Empathy,” though we “shove and plunge,” trying to reach farther up and into the sky’s immensity, into our explanations and justifications for God’s providence in the face of evil, there may be something “not quite right” with us.
Throughout these poems, Underwood can be found “seeking again the ken/between what is made and unmade.” Ken: one’s range of knowledge or insight. Therein lies the central problem. We can never quite get beyond the limited minds we turn toward dusk or debris, toward prayer or classroom window, toward sorrow or answer or praise or thanksgiving. In our finitude, in our limited ken, we can only stand before the everlasting—before the aionios—mouths agape, hushed, one moment full of shame, more “trespass than [we’ll] be able to amend,” and in the next moment full of gratitude, then humility, then joy, then this illogical, boundless, wonder-deep, long-suffering awe.