Like the best marriages, the term pietas metrica, employed by the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, joins the highest expressions of nature and religion. Suzanne Underwood Rhodes’ Flying Yellow: New and Selected Poems further deepens and humanizes this notion, moving from the “pitch-black storms” of girlhood to a “ladder of arms” raising her to an ecstatic Sufi-like whir capturing in word and heart the fruited world around and within her.
This is no self-pitying record of defeat, but a book of rebirth and restoration, a fact suggested by several poems’ titles: “O Forgiveness,” “Therapy Dog,” “The Art of Meditation,” “Battered Victory,” “Stand Up,” “As I Meditate,” “Learning to Glide,” and “Inner Work.” It is a book of candescent triumph.
slick with moss and missteps, sways side / to side from the first plop, scarce light / at surface, cove darkened with desire / and suffering samsara.
You’d swear an egg / cracked ever so gently, the white seepage, / yolk rivered to your ears.
I see nothing can stand beneath my feet but the solemn / and lovely earth, the molten fire within it, cirrus rags above.
