Fall Book Week: Colleen Shaddox and Johanna Caton, O.S.B., on the Poetry of Sr. Lou Ella Hickman

Welcome to Fall Book Week at Today’s American Catholic. Taking inspiration from Pope Francis’s letter on the role of literature in formation, all this week we will be featuring reviews of recent titles of interest. Today we feature two reviews of Sr. Lou Ella Hickman’s soon-to-be-released poetry collection, writing the stars. Each of the reviewers here brings out complementary aspects of Sr. Lou Ella’s work, and so it feels appropriate to present their impressions together as a kind of “dialogue” in text—Ed.

Poetry as Witness by Colleen Shaddox

writing the stars
By Lou Ella Hickman
Introduction by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (Publication date: October 4, 2024)
$17.95   61 pp.

To be a witness in the legal sense is to testify to the truth that you have experienced. To witness as a Christian is much the same. The difference is this: The courtroom witness testifies to objective, physical reality, while the Christian testifies to the divine activity concurrently at work. The poet testifies to both.

Lou Ella Hickman’s new volume of poetry, writing the stars, is an extended reflection on the poet’s role as a witness. The title piece recounts her first experience with the impulse for poetry, as a child in her family’s pasture:

an infinity of black silk and stars
the beginning
a child’s first poem
an unfolding of hunger for black silken stars

Hickman sometimes writes about unmistakably religious themes. But the bulk of her work also addresses topics grounded in the earth: moonshine, cotton fields, illness and death. Whether the topic is religious or secular, the act of poetry infuses it with divine fire. She writes in a poem for a friend dying of cancer:

i, too, do not know where i am going
until i get there
but the poem is everything
road, map, compass
the very engine driving

The poet is a sister of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, which is an irresistible lens through which to regard her writing. The living word and the word made flesh is what saves us. The tradition of writing among Catholics, saints, professed religious, and poor plodding believers is strong. Perhaps that’s because our faith is based on the merger of the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh. Our faith is a poem, and poetry is a vocation.

None of this is meant to consign Hickman’s poetry to the “devotional” shelf. There is nothing syrupy or complacent about these poems. Hickman even refers to the genre as “ruthless,” which of course it is because it strips away all that is not essential. There are smooth, soft nests to rest in among these poems, but there are shards as well. I’ve given copies of her first book, she: robed and wordless, to friends who have no religious leanings and will do the same with writing the stars.

Witness is also used in the context of standing for social justice. We see a deep concern for that in her subjects, such as a Shoah survivor defending immigrants in a dangerously nativist United States and Sister Dianna Ortiz, who endured rape and torture while stationed in Guatemala and became an advocate for survivors of torture worldwide. In both cases, as so often in these poems, the story is told by a speaker removed from the experience rather than in the voice of the protagonist. Perhaps this is Hickman making space for the experience of the other, rather than appropriating it.

Two poems reference Lakota spirituality. The notes explain that Hickman asked Lakota Elder Virgil Taken Alive to review the pieces and give permission for their publication. Especially beautiful is “unci maka,” Lakota for “Mother Earth”:

i want to touch the poems
that come as breath to her
i want to inhale
the smell of her deep green jungle wild and ageless
the first snow’s fragrance
perfuming mountain forests
i want to taste
her glistening sugar of stars scattered on each velvet night
the salt flavor of ocean spray
the grit of desert sand
then
i want
to see thru the eye of the sun
all that she is birthing

Hickman’s poetry could only have been written by a Catholic, I believe, but the expanse of the wonder that she presents us with is decidedly universal, or catholic if you like. Though there are soaring celebrations like “unci maka,” there are also poems that focus on acts of cruelty, the pain of aging and other dark subjects. It takes light and dark to make a world. If we truly love the world, as Hickman passionately does, we must ignore neither. ♦

Colleen Shaddox is co-author with Joanne Samuel Goldblum of Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty.

Reclaiming the Sacred by Johanna Caton, O.S.B.

I had better come clean. I don’t always understand contemporary poetry: I can’t follow the poems that zigzag from image to image. I feel frustrated when confronted with the poetic condensation of ideas that so abbreviates them that their meaning is impossible for me to decode. So I was in one of my anti-contemporary-poetry moods when I first began to read Lou Ella Hickman’s new collection, writing the stars. But within about five minutes everything changed. I’d reached the seventh poem in the collection, which is also the title poem, and I realized that I had been lifted right out of my own world and was inhabiting the poem’s world: I was lying on my back in an empty field at night staring up at the starry sky.

Lou Ella Hickman has been a Sister of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament for many years. She sees her experiences through the lens of the sacred. And although wearing someone else’s eyeglasses never works, when we look through Hickman’s lens, we can see what she sees, and it works. Her are poems filled with wonder. They are always wise and often witty. But they are not always religious in the usual sense of the word: Hickman finds the sacred in unexpected ways and places.

In form, the poems are free, not rhymed, not metric; Hickman uses punctuation sparingly, and capital letters not at all. But her ideas are sequential and her meaning is clear. The poems are without excess in word or emotion. This gives them an uncanny intensity—similar to the way a modern ballet may present its dancers clad only in leotards and tights and ballet shoes, allowing the audience an exciting and almost direct experience of the music, the dancer’s body, and the dance. So Hickman’s poems “perform” without fluff; she gives us the word, its music and its meaning. Most of the poems are short: one poem is only three lines long; the longest is only 34 lines. But in every poem there is movement.

Where do we go? Sometimes we go to a scene or situation that seems at first commonplace. The poem called “the retired lady at the texas assisted living facility” comes to mind. Here, we meet an elderly woman wearing “bottle bottom glasses” and “pushing her cane” down the corridor of an assisted living residence. The speaker in the poem helps her to accomplish a small task and the lady thanks her profusely. End of poem. Unsensational? Maybe. Poignant? Definitely. By the end of the short poem, the words become radiant with the fragile beauty of an infirm, elderly woman, who is like “the dandelion blown into wishes,” as Hickman tells us in the poem’s last line.

The title poem, “writing the stars,” is one of my favorites in the collection. In only 10 lines we join a child who is somehow alone in her family’s vast pasture at night—an evocative scene, and the poem works its magic. Hickman lets us experience what first made her child-self not only aware of infinity, but also aware that she was aware. Here, her very first poem came to birth. In one of her most masterful final lines, we exit the poem sharing in the poet’s “unfolding of hunger for black silken stars.” And we find, too, one of the paradoxes of religion: that some “hungers” are, in reality, great feasts.

But these are poems that do not always deal with easy subjects. Hickman brings her lens to situations that are among life’s most painful. Her poem “the final say” is one of these. Here, she sits at the bedside of a close friend who was dying. At the close of this poem, the reader is left with the painful irony that whispers behind the poem’s title: who (or Who) really has “the final say” about death? Hickman knows that in a life given to listening to the divine voice, often our answers become questions and our questions become the answers. She brings us to this threshold many times in this collection.

Or the poem titled “among the ashes: a tiny red suitcase found after a house fire.” This poem hurts. And it should. It is only 48 words, but when I reach the end I am no longer the person I was at the beginning. The last word of the poem is body—referring to the body of the child who died in the fire. But I sense a new connection with the Body of Christ in this poem—with Christ who compasses all human tragedies in the tragedy of his own death. The poem does not mention the crucifixion—it doesn’t have to. It takes you there, in the tiny red suitcase belonging to the child’s doll.

But Hickman is seeking the sacred, and she gives us what she finds wherever she finds it. How about breakfast as an occasion for a little epiphany? In the poem “all saints church of the kitchen table” Hickman gives us God with our bacon and eggs and toast “spread with mercy.” “Grandma’s pickled okra” is on this altar, and the sacred vestments are the “holy pjs, slippers and jeans.” I hear the laughter at this table, and see the small children, faces speckled with toast crumbs. This is a vivid poem that points to the revelatory power of the every day. I can hear and smell and taste God in this poem, and the “amen” towards the end is one I also say when I get there.

All the poems in this collection have treasures to offer. I’m thinking especially of readers who may feel that their life is like a swift-flowing river, with a current that carries off the important moments of life before they’ve had enough time to find their meaning. These poems may help their readers to reclaim some of those experiences of the sacred. ♦

Sr. Johanna Caton is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, including The Christian Century, St. Austin Review, St. Katherine Review, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other publications.