Bower Lodge: Poems by Paul J. Pastor
Published by Fernwood Press

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Review by Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University, Utah, USA

Bower Lodge is the kind of luminous collection you get when a poet of rare conceptual and rhetorical ingenuity as well as principled conviction also trains a studied eye on the natural world. Spirituality meets ecopoetics meets dry wit meets epic journey in this tour de force. Conceiving of his volume as a journey toward perception and new life, Paul J. Pastor crafts masterpiece after masterpiece along the way.

I can only discuss (or even name) a few poems in this brief review. “Nine Kinds of Blindness” mentions two scenarios in which eyes do not work but seven, provocatively, in which they do. These include ones where “you cannot see what you have never seen before” or where “there is no light” or, conversely, where “there is nothing but light,” evoking the mystical luminosity of divine presence. “Bee Tree,” by contrast, involves no dazzling vision but instead languid gazing at a decrepit plant, slowly noticing bees flitting about it, “one by one, / in and out, / in and out / and in,” inducing a meditative rhythm that immerses one in its surroundings. If the first is a poem we think, the second is one we feel; each, crucially, enables us to see. To cite just one more (out of a collection of, truly, dozens of favorites), the volume’s title poem addresses us directly (“You’ll know the day has come / because you fear it”), inducting us into a process of dying that is more than mere “expiration. It is,” rather, “a clarity of being, / a last enunciation / that starts again anew,” leading us to understanding as it leads its “Beloved Wanderer” to new life.

Such renewal is Pastor’s preoccupation and his poetry’s special gift. Each poem attests to the poet’s deep belief in the goodness of nature. Nature in the poems, granted, is complex; in her Foreword to the volume, Abigail Carroll describes the collection as one in which “we overhear unspeakable glory – the monstrously beautiful noise of all things becoming themselves.” Pastor does not ignore pain, death, and decay in this volume, far from it. Ultimately, however, he perceives and gives radiant expression to the abundance teeming within them. “Nine Kinds of Blindness”? This is, through and through, a poetry of vision.

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Paul J. Pastor is an award-winning writer, editor (for Penguin Random House), and poet whose most recent book is Bower Lodge: Poems. His work has appeared widely, including in The Los Angeles Review of Books, FORMA, The Windhover, Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, Fathom, and many other excellent outlets, and has been anthologized by the New York Quarterly Review. He is a candidate for Master of Fine Art in Poetry at the University of St. Thomas. He lives in Oregon.