RACHEL BARENBLAT'S CHAPLAINBOOK* POETRY MADE OF PAIN

"Oh, God, no!"

you might say to yourself, holding in your hands a collection of poems written during the author's internship in "clinical pastoral education" at Albany Medical Center. She was training to be a hospital chaplain - confronting those hard moments of life that are easy to get sentimental about, those moments of great pain and loss and death. "Oh, God," you might want to say, thinking perhaps these poems will go soft at all the wrong moments.

Rest assured, friends, this is not that kind of poetry. Rachel Barenblat's chaplainbook* is work by one who is a poet first and foremost. Barenblat knows how to make a poem, and it is incidental that she has shaped these poems out of her hospital experience. Indeed, she has made seventeen strong poems for this collection. She recognizes that whatever the "obvious" subject, a poem is always about the poetry of our existence, that ineffable lifting up that occurs when we are most fully human. It matters less that these poems are about events in Barenblat's internship in the chaplaincy program; it matters most that she pays attention to the importance of those moments, and to the hidden power which fills them with meaning. We are blessed that Barenblat can speak that which otherwise stays unspoken.

Not that being able to see and to make poems out of what she sees is easy for her. Already in the first poem of the book, "First Night," we find Barenblat admitting:

this is real and I am
completely unprepared.

In the next stanza:

The old woman on seven
seems soothed by the psalm
but then rasps "get out!"

The poem ends:

At dawn I walk the halls
like a monastery's courtyards.
I don't know what prayers
do, but I scatter them
like rose petals anyway.

In the poem, "Beginning," Barenblat wonders:

What does it take to begin
when all around you
stories are ending?

She is the new intern in the chaplaincy program, fresh and eager.

We all know frostbitten grapes
make sweeter wine, but
the metaphor only works
so far. Things can go wrong.

And so she gets called to the bedside of an old man whose pacemaker kept going, but whose heart could not:

... his fiancee weeps...
rubbing his wrinkled hand
as if it would ever grow warm
again in her own.

Barenblat's "On-Call Prayer" ends:

Shelter this ship
through the longest night.
Remove the sorrows
of sailors and passengers.
Help us reach the dawn.

She is seeing us at our most vulnerable, and her response to our vulnerability is not some phony "pip, pip" and stiff upper lip; rather, Barenblat acknowledges her own vulnerability, as in "Benediction," when a patient

rasps out a blessing
for my vocation....

The poet can't help wondering:

did some voice tell her
what I needed?

In "Bridge," she writes of a woman who can't remember; her husband

... might be at home
making a sandwich on soft rye
or maybe he's dead, sitting shiva
on the other side, waiting
for her to remember the way.

I think such poems are believeable precisely because Barenblat does not stand above or aside from the pain, but acknowledges her own.

And because she keeps a sense of humor. It never occurred to her that she ought expect such a question when a woman's husband has died:

can't you bring him back?
I'm so startled
I have to swallow

lines like "I'm only
a first-year chaplain;
they cover resurrection
in level two." All I say
is how sorry I am....

"Leaps of faith never get easier," Barenblat acknowledges in "Sea of Reeds:"

Stepping into the hospital hallway
is like plunging into the sea
trusting the waters to recede
so I can get where I'm going....

Still I hover outside patient rooms
cowed by the unkown currents
swirling inside. If I'm afraid
I don't know how to swim
will I choke on salt and drown?

In the final poem in the collection, "Shore," Barenblat admits that:

All our unanswerables...
remain unanswered.

The strength of these poems is that Barenblat declines to accept any easy answers. The mysteries of life and death are mysteries, and she refuses to diminish them with silly talk. She is willing to look at some of the hardest of our experiences and she doesn't flinch; she doesn't hide the pain; she doesn't lie to us about what she sees. Mercifully, she doesn't offer any false comfort.

While we tend to look to the "helping professions" for answers, in fact they have no more wisdom than any of the rest of us. Indeed, the sub-text in Barenblat's poems, I think, may be that - however much the chaplain helps us in the hard moments - our real answers are always and only to be found in our lone hearts. That is quite a lesson to learn from a single internship, isn't it?

-----------------------------
*Rachel Barenblat, chaplainbook. Laupehouse, 2006. Order from Lulu. $10.

Comments

[Rachel]

I'm honored by this review, Tom. A thousand thank-yous; there is nothing so satisfying (and vaguely terrifying) as really being read.

You allow me to see my own work through new eyes, and that's a gift indeed.

[leslee]

Good reading of this collection. And you're spot on that it's an unflinching look at a difficult service from the inside, traveling along on the poet's rounds and hearing her thoughts, feeling her trepidation. I loved the collection and didn't get pulled up by a single false note.

[Dave]

I had much the same reaction to Rachel's book. One of the best chapbooks I've read.

[dale]

Yes, it's a wonderful collection. Great review, Tom!

Another thing I really liked about it was how varied the poems were, how modulated the experience of reading the poems straight through was. Who would have thought so many different *kinds* of poems could arise from this experience? (Well, anyone who's thought much about poetry, I suppose, ought to think that, but I didn't :->)

[Rachel]

Consider me blushing, over here; y'all are good for my ego!

More seriously, I'm delighted that so many thoughtful and smart people find the poems worthwhile. Readers like you are worth your weight in gold.

I haven't really written anything since chaplainbook came out. Perhaps it's a kind of postpartum creative lull; more likely I've just allowed my life to get too busy, which effectively precludes poetry. It's good to be reminded, therefore, that I'm not always in this fallow space -- that the poems have arisen before, and will do again...