POETRY, NONFICTION & FICTION SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN. LEARN MORE & SUBMIT.
Fly rod, reel, and flies

River, Amen: Spiritual Skepticism and the Natural World

Review by Mary Brancaccio

River, Amen
By Michael Garrigan
Wayfarer Books | 2023 | 124 pages

    
River, Amen, by Michael GarriganMichael Garrigan’s second poetry collection, River, Amen, uses fly fishing to guide philosophical explorations of spirituality, environmental destruction, and annihilation. Garrigan probes these topics in free verse poems marked by the steadiness and patience it takes to land a brook trout. In the end, he arrives at an acceptance of impermanence that echoes Buddhism, even though his book is formatted as a Catholic mass.

Garrigan opens with a poetic invitation to “Listen before / all these water songs evaporate.” Some poems are “hymns,” others are “liturgy.” He evokes communion, “wafer turned into body amen and a long walk back to your pew,” as he documents his struggle with Catholicism. In “Searching the Database of Priests Accused of Sexual Assault,” the poet sees his monsignor’s name next to a notation, “photos of nude altar boys, dismissed, deceased” and asks: “What if all we have are paintings of the Last Supper? / What if transubstantiation is just a manipulation of the sacred to the profane?” His questions feel pressing. He repeatedly folds in his altar boy experiences, occasionally to comic effect. In “Father Joe,” Garrigan recalls a priest muttering curses that only he could hear. Father Joe murmurs “asshole” when an unpleasant congregant walks down the aisle, or “shit” when “the choir started in too early.” As a boy, Garrigan enjoyed “those curse words in that sacred syntax.” But later, in “Conrad, Pennsylvania 8:20 PM” he asks, “What gods do we pray to in moments like these? // Those of our dead fathers and yellow stoneflies?” The “River Loving Spiritual Skeptic” continues his search.

In “Bully Pulpit,” Garrigan links Christianity to a massacre of Pennsylvania’s Indigenous people. He recounts how “Reverend Elder” preached the gospel of genocide “with a rifle in one hand, a bible in the other.” The sermons goaded the Paxton Boys, “good men in private,” who then “scalped and killed and burnt [the] homes” of the Conestoga/Susquehannock people in 1763. These men slaughtered the last 14 survivors, who’d taken refuge in a local jail, viciously torturing them before putting “a bullet in each mouth. // with praises of the Almighty, Amen.” It’s a damning depiction, using recorded church history in italics to document the viciousness of this genocide.

But there’s an elegiac chord beneath Garrigan’s uncertainty in River, Amen. In “Two Catholics Meet Over a Campfire,” he and a woman swap memories about church-going. At one point, the woman admits doubting that the Eucharist is really Christ’s body. The man replies, “You know, that’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? / something that shouldn’t need a line or a robe.” After pausing, the woman responds that she really misses sharing gestures of peace: “I loved moving around the pews searching for / hands to hold, taking the body.” The desire to find community lingers as faith slips away.

Another shadow falls across Garrigan’s poem, “The River, a Ghost.” Its opening imagery evokes a fetus in a womb:

Bones break water—vertebrae tracing sky
no longer womb but a large eddy that never dries

its depth and darkness a kindness on summer days,
the river giving birth in its slow dissolve into a ghost.

Chronicling a river’s disappearance during drought, Garrigan describes the river as “what it used to be, what it used to cover.” He juxtaposes imagery of water and human bodies, detailing “narrow strips of water flesh, taut ligaments too thin to hide fish.” A heron arrives to hunt in now-shallow waters, evoking a lament that he suddenly breaks with an exclamatory, “but this is bullshit.”

Garrison apologizes for “hiding grief when [he] knows that to hide is to bury,” for trying to link “a river in drought / to a couple unable to have children.” He wonders, thinking about that absent child, “Can something never alive become a ghost?” The desire for the river to be replenished by “subterranean streams seeping… a conjuring of hope into life” returns the poet to metaphor-making, but he sees only “river bones.” Again, he interrupts: “And this is also bullshit. Here.” The poet uses white space for a pause, before returning to the couple’s intimacy:

We are left with desire for rain.
We are left with sunlight and moonlight and nights so dark
               all we are is thigh against thigh
               all we hear is the slow murmur of water kissing rock
               all we trace is the intertwining of our ligaments,
                          liturgies of love, a topography
so thin so taut we can’t help but break
our ghosts into pieces with our thirst.

Through repetitions, Garrigan drives home the heartache of infertility. Faith in the natural order of things erodes. Breaking “ghosts into pieces” alludes to the sacrament of communion, transforming the loss. But the couple’s communion brings pain, not spiritual comfort. The drought that diminishes the river is the same catastrophe diminishing procreation. The longing for a child, like the longing for belief, is painted against a “topography” that lacks “a new horizon.” The greatest catastrophes, Garrigan reminds us, are personally devastating and universal.

In a poetry collection focused on solitary moments of fly fishing or occasions of  male-bonding, the feminine stands mostly on the sidelines. But when Garrigan turns his attention to women closest to him, his tender imagery offers an oasis from his skepticism and his catalogs of environmental degradation. In “Liturgy of Becoming an Erratic,” Garrison draws the earth’s “soft soil” where “a thaw / that becomes a womb buoying you” as “the frigid warms / into a comforting freshet that finally exposes you.” The erratic, created by melting snow, digs into the soil and dirt of the “you” in this poem, a violent scratching that strips one until

                              … in that nakedness
               —friction, sound—
you stand and spread and scatter
slowly and create a cocoon of roaring.

Garrigan’s sibilance invokes running water that sculpts the erratic, ending with resistance of rocks. The oxymoron of the roaring cocoon bristles with emotional energy, lingering until the erratic becomes a voice of “stillness.” The sculpting of the riverbed by water evokes an image of the sacred feminine. Now the erratic “holds a river” that sings hymns. Here, Garrigan’s experiment with “interbeing” reveals how entangled all living things are, even with soil and rock.

Garrigan relishes this longing for interconnection. In “Liturgy of Carp Becoming a God,” he describes fish “shuffling like stalks of corn in mourning wind.” He shifts to the second person, inviting himself (or the reader) to “an island thick with knotweed… to let the river show you how to be.” The fish, a Christian symbol, take turns feeding in deeper waters, like a congregation during communion. The “you” moves closer, sliding a hand, then a whole arm into the river. In the ensuing stillness “you think you finally found the right words to build a prayer / that will be heard” but the fish “notice you, / because that’s what Gods do, notice.” The transformed carp disappear, leaving the seeker wanting “to become a river-prayer-flag forever caught in current.” Yearning for a sacred connection frustrated, Garrigan moves in a new direction. In “Liturgy of Going to Water,” prefaced by a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, he explores “an interbeing of brook trout and body manifesting / landscape lineages of what we seek.” The endless “emptying and returning, always, to another river” suggests a rejection of linear time and an embrace of the coexistence of all things across all times. It gives the poet courage to assert that even in drought, “there is always a river.”

Garrigan’s relationship with rivers is complicated. Rivers have been places to fish, to play, to meditate. Several rivers in this book—the Androscoggin, the Otsego, the Penobscot, the Susquehanna—are named after Indigenous people annihilated or relocated. Genocide’s legacy threatens the sacred, as do the degradations of dams, coal mining, and industrial pollution. Drought and dam diversions reduce once-rich waters to thinning ghosts of themselves. At the book’s end, his grief is tempered. Garrigan’s final poem, “Benediction,” closes his poetic mass with a three-line prayer:

All our water songs evaporate
            All our water songs evaporate
                        All our water songs evaporate
                                                                                               Amen.

It’s a sad, but oddly fitting conclusion to Garrigan’s search for divinity in the natural world. In accepting impermanence, his own and that of the natural world, he finds harsh consolation. It’s not the warm comfort of denial, but rather a stark truth reflected in the world he so closely observes.

  

  

Mary BrancaccioMary Brancaccio is a poet and teacher. Her poetry collection, Fierce Geometry, is available from Get Fresh Books. Her work has appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Minerva Rising, Edison Literary Review, Rattle, and other journals. Brancaccio is included in several national and international poetry anthologies, including Writing the Land: Northeast and Writing the Land: Maine. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Brancaccio has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her website is ghostgirlpoet.com.

Header photo by Ken Haines, courtesy Pixabay.

Glacier of the moment, by Deborah Fries
Previous
EXPEDITION