Kerygma Nights

Kerygma NightsSo much of our poetry, its surrealist pizzazz and saccharine beauty, wears a missionarys dubious smile. Not this. Zavgrens book concedes nothing to persuade us or to woo us, and yet, line by line, it demands everything. It confronts us with the fact of an inimitable and articulate mystery. She pretends to be a nave pastoralist or the Queen of Swords, and she does indeed know her zinnia and zelkovaand hold the key to the tower. But every seduction is

So much of our poetry, its surrealist pizzazz and saccharine beauty, wears a missionaryÕs dubious smile. Not this. ZavgrenÕs book concedes nothing to persuade us or to woo us, and yet, line by line, it demands everything. It confronts us with the fact of an inimitable and articulate mystery. She pretends to be a na•ve pastoralist or the Queen of Swords, and she does indeed know her zinnia and zelkovaÑand hold the key to the tower. But every seduction is the kerygma. The actual is evangelical; her flowers put nature in abeyance. And her testimony to the laminations of shale, the secret calibrations of the karmendriyas, to the floods of Blood Brook and to the catalpa with its turgid beans, to the ordeal of beauty and the ecstasies of absence, to fornex nights and the tzimtzum of thought and the great gangsa of the sunÑthese are the tidings of our Golgotha morning, foreshortening every grief and a continent of distances.
-- Joel Newberger