Grace Like Water by Merrijane Rice
Mormon Lit Lab, 2020
i – in a series of quick bites
Jefferson’s New Testament was stripped of divinity and miracles and redemption, reduced to a series of pithy sayings and trickster morality from an excellent human named Jesus—a New Testament perfect to be left on the back of a toilet.
Read Grace Like Water this same way. Snippets of New Testament beauty and wisdom defamiliarized by Rice’s sure hand.
Can you imagine a man
who would make fountains
of us all?(“At Jacob’s Well”)
ii – alongside
In her introduction, Rice writes that the leadership of her church announced 2019 would be spent reading the New Testament; at the same time, the nascent Mormon Lit Lab approached her about being one of their first book projects. And so she read the New Testament alongside millions of her fellow Latter-day Saints and each week, on schedule, she produced an accompanying poem or two.
Read Grace Like Water alongside your own visit to one of the great wisdom books humanity has produced. When its ancient setting gets to be too much, turn to this twenty-first-century Virgil, who can guide your path.
When everyone’s in the car waiting
but I can’t find my shoes,
Mom says, “Open your eyes and look.”(“It’s Hard to Be Little”)
iii – contrapuntally
What good is poetry that simply rehashes the previous generation of wordsmithery? Every revolution requires looking through the past in order to see the future. Wordsworth, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg, Oliver—a casual viewer may not recognize how the new way upthrows the old, but Wordsworth could only open the Romantic era by embracing the Classical era until he had crushed it into diamonds.
While Rice at times dances alongside the old apostles, at other times she stamps them into wine.
declare yourself to me,
for I also am your offspring.(“To the Unknown God”)
iv – as with those who mourn
This Jesus they speak of, he made himself low and associated himself with those who suffered. He spoke with and of widows and lepers and beggars and the blind. Our age isn’t just one of pandemic and political chaos, it is also one where the prosperity gospel is the most loudly preached of the gospels, though it is neither Matthew nor Mark nor Luke nor John.
The gospel of Rice pays attention to the lowly. It reaches out; it gathers in. Allusions which are plain become metaphors reapplied, to remind us that we too have our widowed and our leprous, our beggarly and our blind—and our obligation to oblate.
But I remember another widow
who fed a stranger
from her dearth,so I have come to the temple
to render unto God
what is his—not just these morsels in my hand,
but everything within me
that bears His image.Perhaps if I do not fail,
many will live till the Lord
rains upon us again.(“Two Mites”)
v – like water, as pure gold
Some say Jesus was murdered because his words were too plain. Some say because his words were too hard to hear. Small-press poetry rarely gains large enough an audience to require a decision re murder or no, but as you’ve seen from the quotations above, Rice leans toward plainness. Anything in this volume hard to hear comes not from her language, but just below her language. The words themselves are simple and easy and friendly and kind.
Uncovering anything dangerous therein will require more than mere nibbling.
But anything dangerous was already in the source material and may again be buried, as it always has been, in exegesis or fanaticism or the handling of snakes.
He will read you,
make you as transparent glass—
understood and understanding.
Distinct yet enveloped.
Enduring and malleable
as pure gold.(“Judgment Day”)
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Since his last review appeared in these pages, Theric Jepson has published seven short stories, twenty-eight poems, and probably twenty-thousand tweets, so he definitely has his priorities in order.