A soul cake, I did not know, was a small, spiced cake given to the poor or to children, who would in turn offer prayers for the deceased thought to be lingering between earth and heaven. One might go “souling” and beg for cakes by singing under a window. Vestiges of this Middle Age tradition continue with a variety of customs now associated with Halloween: jack-o-lanterns, trick-or-treating, bobbing for apples. In my shallow dip into this history, I was intrigued by a description of All Saints Day games of divination: “apples turn up in Hallowe’en games as an indication of immortality, for you are trying to seize the magic fruit from under water, or from a string hung from the ceiling, as if you were snatching a fragment of life from the darkness.”
In Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh collection of poetry, Soul Cake, there are many lines that crackle with ars poetica, but this description felt like the book’s spirit, its black cat familiar. Each tightly, sweetly condensed poem is a bite of now snatched from darkness, from time, with a life-affirming sensuousness and incantatory musical lilt that thrills the ear. There are three sections in Soul Cake: “God-Ache” (already, you hear one of Spaar’s many deeply satisfying sonic clasps), “Carols,” and “December Mon Amour.” This is a shivery book, but each section winters us over with numinous charms that resist the “poverty to think / mind ends where body brinks.” (“Love At First Sight Carol”)
The lyric, as I can still hear Ellen Bryant Voigt say in my head, is a song outside of time. And this is a collection of intensely lyric poems: ornate, interior, reverberating with music and feeling. When the exigencies of the mortal body or of narrative consequence enter into these lyric realms, I hold my breath, as if watching one lithe predator in the ambit of another. Take “Snowed Carol,” here in its entirety:
In fondant ice, each inky branch
is new-seen, bowed.
When “for ever after” is exposed
as “now,” is that invention?
Or merely what’s beyond plot’s reach?
I choose the latter, breaching
impossibly without past
or future, a frozen tongue
lipping the roof’s ledge.
Why not fall, like the comet’s char?
As in: I never dreamed of this.
Yet here you are.
Characteristic of the poems in Soul Cake, the hairpin lines begin in looking, then perform a quick and gorgeous marriage of scouring eye to scouring mind. How swiftly it happens: what seems as if it has been revealed or exposed, undresses one layer further in the changing room of the stanza break. [F]or ever after is bound, ultimately, like the branch, to shed both its confection and its posture of prayer, to bare itself as the irreverent now. Kept out of consequence’s reach—impossibly—the lyric offers us its own wisdom: the true dream.
Sharp, clarion, and inescapably beautiful in these poems are Spaar’s descriptions, as in these few opening lines of “Driving”: “Monastic firs, marginal, / conical, in brooding snoods / a finical sun unpacks, clerical // in scarlet fringe of Interstate scrub.” The image, conjured and sustained, comes further and further into focus, a beguilingly extended moment of observation, until this question pierces the tableau like a needle: “Where is the body in such transit?” The question of where is yoked to the question of when, since “what are miles / but time upended?” (“Yonder”) It is in order to snatch a bite of life from darkness, from something as “hungry as my wristwatch,” (“Icy Rain Check”) that these poems keep tabs on time at all times. Clocks, with their gothic dread, make vivid appearances in the book: the moon as “a plucked clock” the “confit of second-hands,” for instance, and arrive at a frequency that keeps close the possibility of “mortality’s epiphany.” (“Solstice” and “Four Lessons”)
The sonnet is the reigning formal impulse of Soul Cake, and Spaar’s tightly echoic lines resist the pull of narrative’s forward motion: we re-encounter what we just heard, a sense of the past re-exerting itself or, perhaps, a circling re-arrival at the same door. Yet, the double-tap of a final rhymed couplet clicks some poems shut so resoundingly, their amputated finality almost stuns. One can’t, of course, appreciate the end without the whole, but take these two as finales you can anticipate awaiting you. The closing couplet of “Love at First Sight Carol”:
what one might call a soul
were it not so horizontal, so foretold.
And this lovely, haunting end, from “Scar”:
Blue signatures wizen every hour,
stain the drive out with wounds the birds devour.
There are quite a few poems in Soul Cake that don’t adhere to fourteen lines, but still feel bound by a sonnet-y invisible fence and pulled toward the sonnet’s lure: the volta-crank that cracks a window in a problem’s room. In “Espalier” the speaker conjures a moment with a beloved that is both “paradise” and “too private to say.” Meanwhile, on the other side of a wall, “pear trees splay / trained by stakes & wire to stay, // to flower & swell & fruit despite constraint.” This description of form and its respect for the yields of artifice and control reminded me of my marveling at the first chapter of The Birth of the Modern Mind, which confidently claims that the arrival of the sonnet meant that “Emotional problems […] might now actually be resolved, or provisionally resolved, through the logic of a form that turned expression inward, to a resolution in the abiding peace of the soul itself.”
It is surprising, the variety of ways these poems resolve (whose etymological root is to melt—a significant resonance in this wintry book) under the pressure of the form and under the omnipresent shadow of time. There are, as the opening poem “Chiastic” tells us, “No facts but what love makes of them,” and the volta’s re-vision is repeatedly and convincingly triggered in Soul Cake by the you—erotic, familial, inwards and out. The you offers the flicker of portal, the escape from the body’s edges and expiry: “Sweet Christ, forgive / & mend me; for my love makes me // believe, thumb on my heart, I will never die.” (“Feu de Joie”) But the form elicits other revelations as well, like the “blue sashay of horizon” within sight, bringing us to an ultimate Dickensonian dash: “flesh, / what’s that to death? We know, we know, / as over its edge we go—” (“Yonder”)
Having been fed by these poems, one might think the book itself is the titular soul cake: spiced, offered to any reader who has shown up beneath Spaar’s metaphorical window, asking. And now, what prayers might be owed in exchange? But Soul Cake, too, is composed of song, is its own wassail that shepherds a soul toward abiding peace, like the sonnet. In that closed-circuit wholeness—the you and me, the ask/answer pair that a couplet is suited for, a kind of double-authentication—there is the lyric machinery that releases these gorgeously hard-won final lines of “December Mon Amour” and of the book:
[…] Now, palms press palm.
Push. You tectonic, cellular.
Me, wrested from—.
God-flint. Flesh plinth. Time.
1Green, Marian (1980) A Harvest of Festivals. Longman
2Oppenheimer, Paul. The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1989.