Nate Klug’s chapbook Beautiful Meteor (The Economy Press, $15, 22 pp.) gets its epigraph and title from a speech Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to Harvard Divinity School’s graduating class of 1838. In it, the ex-Unitarian Emerson criticized institutional Christianity: partly on the grounds that believers must “dare to love God without mediator or veil,” partly because ministers seemed to suggest that, while miracles once happened, they no longer did. “It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake,” as Emerson put it. The address, biographer Robert D. Richardson reports, elicited thirty-six printed responses, many of them nasty. In one Boston newspaper, Andrews Norton called the speech an “incoherent rhapsody” and “an insult to religion.”
Klug, in addition to being an excellent poet, is a Congregational minister at the First Parish in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and his epigraph quotes Emerson on a phenomenon many of his readers, and maybe even some of his parishioners, will be familiar with: showing up to, and being thoroughly unmoved by, Sunday services, feeling that the world outside church is more present than the world inside it. Emerson writes: “A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow.” The wintery scene framed by the window stands for everything that the preacher and his church aren’t: alive where he is ghostly, delightful where it is dull. The snow burns up brightly like a meteor; the minister holds forth lukewarmly like an automaton. “The true preacher can be known by this,” Emerson writes, “that he deals out to the people his life,—life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography.”
As a minister, Klug knows, and probably worries over, the challenge that Emerson sets: to make what is in church feel as real as what is outside it. As a poet, Klug also knows that Emerson’s challenge to the minister could double as a challenge to the poet. Like the minister, the poet must make his words both beautiful and real. Like the minister, his language must give the sense of “life passed through the fire of thought.” Klug’s poems reveal some facts of his biography: we see his daughter Zoe’s “birdboned frame” as it goes “into the tunnel of [a medical technician’s] machine”; we hear of ministerial duties (“off to bury barely / beyond a child”) and of parental responsibilities (“school drop-off”). And yet often the speaker remains elusive, just beyond our grasp. Depending upon the poem, Klug might use the first, second, and third person. He is not a particularly voicey poet—or, rather, his voice is changeable, shifty. For Image, Klug wrote a superb essay in which he spoke of Keats’s notion of negative capability—the capacity “to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—as perhaps “the bridge between [his] life’s two callings.” The minister and the poet must be both there and not there, occupying what Klug calls “a zone of attentive hesitancy.” Maybe the spectral quality of Emerson’s minister, at least in some situations, isn’t a weakness, allowing you to listen with care to your parishioners’ sorrows or to see with clarity the beauty of the world around you.
The first poem in Beautiful Meteor, “Fall Back: Concord,” opens like this:
A plastic bag on a hitching post
rips for jack-o-lantern eyes
An I VOTED sticker slapped to a CAUTION sign
The oaks shocked yellow
and dumping leaves like pills
As all things turn to fire
and fire, exhausted, falls back into things
The poem’s title gestures in several directions simultaneously. Fall, with its Halloween decorations, election signs, and fiery foliage, is back once again. Daylight saving time has ended, as the clocks have fallen back and left us with darker, chillier afternoons. Klug, who grew up in Massachusetts and ministered in Iowa and California, is back once again in New England for the autumn. His lines, in this poem and in the whole collection, lack end-stopping. We fall not back but forward, from line to line and stanza to stanza, the flux enlivening and occasionally dizzying.
The italicized lines, which come from Heraclitus, describe the dance that takes place between fire and things, energy and matter—a dance that is constant and uncatchable, both destructive and life-giving. They also recall another minister-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” begins, “Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillow | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- / Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.” In Klug and Hopkins, language dances from one sound and image to the next, never settling down, from the plainness of “A plastic bag on a hitching post” to the lovely assonance of “oaks shocked yellow” to the play of “leaves like pills,” from the alliterative flood of “torn tufts, tossed,” where music is all, to the boisterousness of “heaven-roysterers,” where diction (did you have to look roysterers up? I did) takes precedence. Hopkins’s rhythms are brilliant and showy, easy to imitate and impossible to match; Klug’s are quiet and richly varied. In both cases, this is poetry of fire and movement. And yet, in Hopkins and Klug, the poet also attends to, even falls back into, things: the stuff of suburban Massachusetts and the stuff of sublime nature. Fire matters. But matter matters, too, all those incarnated, material things, “I VOTED” stickers and “cloud-puffballs,” that help make up our existence.
Beautiful Meteor is filled with the particulars—social, sensory, phenomenological—of Massachusetts life, where, “when summer rain condescends / to fall, […] oil fumes unlocked from the scarified pavement”; where, during a too-cold early-fall day, you see “the walkers without mittens, playing stubborn / at the too-sudden change.” (I too grew up in Massachusetts; I too have been such a walker.) Later in “Fall Back: Concord,” we witness the “turbid sky” of November afternoons and notice “infants twitch[ing] their lips,” all tucked up inside, “safe in their chambers of white noise.” (That last image wittily channels another Massachusetts poet, Emily Dickinson, but replaces the babbling bees from “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” with the infant’s white-noise machine.) In “Further Proof,” a speaker wakes up early to write poetry. Instead of hearing a muse, he hears mice skittering in the walls: “More at home in the new house / than you yourself / already intimate with its vents and spoils.” “Tree Swing” opens with a couplet in which a typical childhood experience, swinging from an oak tree (one hears the echo of Robert Frost’s “Birches”), is memorably and musically rendered—“Six sneakers skimmed the dirt / climbed the sun to poke its yolk”—before the speaker, in the scene’s silence, thinks “of other poets // how they could bring back their dreams / in voices I believed in.”
It's worth noting that the speaker thinks of other poetic voices from within silence. Beautiful Meteor has other moments of silence, too. “Noli Me Tangere” opens with a striking image of animal presence: “The shadow of a hawk / down the neighbor’s red barn Easter week // a fading, puzzled red / more museum clay than blood.” The speaker sees the hawk’s shadow. That is to say, this animal presence is really marked by a kind of absence—an absence that only becomes more resonant as we move across the stanzas. The poem ends with an image of an emptiness that is somehow also a plenitude: “with every cherry birch bare / and the hawk not even here // our brief silence / its fierce evidence.” The shortness of line and simplicity of diction belies the passage’s exquisite music. There’s internal rhyme (“every cherry”), there’s slant rhyme (“bare” and “here”), there’s assonance (“even,” “here,” “brief,” “fierce”). In a poem from his previous collection, the speaker’s spiritual director “suggested silence” as a Good Friday spiritual practice. Sometimes, silence prepares us to hear grace. Sometimes, silence is an appropriate response to it. Not many poets can make silence resound as richly as Klug can. He is one of those poets whose voice I believe in.
