Salms

"In his seventh book of poems, Salms, Aaron McCollough navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the Biblical Psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. It is a place of recovery and discovery, "all silent but newly charted/ territory we would recognize," as McCollough writes. In this vision, The God of the Biblical Psalter is sustained by praise much as its creatures are sustained by food. Salms adopts the probative, endangered position of the occupants of this psychic and spiritual ecology, "pinched down and hived into an insect of attention," and "Being seen to show the world one's insides." At the same time, McCollough explores the paradox, long noted, that the Psalter is rife with grieving, imploring, and cruel fantasies of retribution. The path the Biblical psalms takes is a circuitous journey James L. Crenshaw recently described as moving from "grief to thanksgiving, from lament to praise," and it is a path that McCollough's salms follows, in the gently subversive tradition of the great early seventeenth century poet George Herbert, for whom language offered both "the soul in paraphrase" and an "[e]ngine against th' Almighty." Formally restless and diverse, McCollough's poems move from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined journal-like confessional, blending high modern solemnity and postmodern negation. Like its near namesake, Salms is a heterodox gathering, an erudite and poetically masterful work of lyric intensity and raw confrontation with God and self. Its sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration. "When I kept silence, my bones roared,/ says the psalmist, whose heart also melts/ like wax": McCollough's salms, heartbroken and resilient, raise their voices in a world grown suspicious of sacred congress. Still, they keep singing, ragged and dense, "listening for an / undone drone/ to rise between / sound blooms.""