Acts
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A book of poems that reckons with love in all its forms, by the priest and poet Spencer Reece—his first collection in ten years.
. . . My old love,
my love who gave me language that I love,
when there are no words, there are only acts.
Spencer Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest, suffuses his poetry with tenderness, humanity, and a wonderous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück wrote, “emanating from Spencer Reece’s work [is] a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion; it is a great thing to have it again in art.”
Acts, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker’s parents lived until the death of his father, and to Little Compton, Rhode Island. The poems are also an homage to the letter itself, to its art and its waning means of connection across distance. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The excellent latest from Reece (The Road to Emmaus) is immersed in a faithful, but not unquestioning, lyricism, in part inflected by his life as a priest ("Still singing in my cell," as he puts it). Having moved to Madrid, Reece suffuses the poems with Spain's music and poetry, with allusions to Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado running throughout. The country is itself one of the embodied figures of these poems: "Spain, you smell like cigarettes—/ generous, plump, never grumpy about sex." Neither is the collection "grumpy about sex," or love. It's a carnally charged tussle between "unidentified loneliness" and "he erotic barely contained." "Whatever the question the answer is love," Reece writes in the digressive, charmingly epistolary sequence "Letters from Spain." Righteousness and puritanism are the enemy in these pages, and a leavening wit seeks to amplify, and deepen, an erotic of piety. Lit up by memorable phrases ("above me Christ/ sags in his candelabra of surrender" and "the chandelier of Europe lit with empty churches"), Reece's spry musicality is amplified by his often plainspoken, pared-down syntax: "Longer I go fewer notes/ I need." These poems are generously companionable hymns of delight in service.
