Essays
Voices of Light
Jeffery Beam
I didn't actually receive this title as a review copy, but stumbled upon it on a remaindered book table at my local bookstore. I've been a fan of Barnstone's work since her and Willis Barnstone's groundbreaking and encyclopedic A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken Books, 1980) and Willis Barnstone's The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984). Both books retrieve from obscurity works and literature of spirit and spirituality, poetry and belief, barred from traditional canons. In Voices of Light, Barnstone turns her consummate skills as an editor and translator to collecting a core sample of women's spiritual poetry across time and geography. These women converse forcefully with Divinity—always considering themselves equal to, one with, the all-in-all. Their spirituality defies shackles of political and sexual constraint, manifesting instinctual, passionate, determined, and self-aware poems of great beauty, strength and variety. God frequently becomes a lover, or consort, as in this anonymous Egyptian poem of ca. 1,500 B.C.E.: "I find my love fishing / His feet in the shallows. // We have breakfast together / And drink beer. // I offer the magic of my thighs / He is caught in the spell." Enlightenment discloses itself through everyday things and experiences. As in all great spiritual writing the veils between the worlds drop and either the illusionary misery of this world vanishes, or the splendor of the next overcomes this one as in Praxilla's poem from ca. 450 B.C.E.: "Most beautiful of things I leave is sunlight. / Then come glazing stars and the moon's face. / Then ripe cucumbers and apples and pears."
Arranged chronologically, the anthology begins with Enheduanna, a moon priestess and royal daughter of Sumeria, who is the first known writer in world history, and concludes with a generous selection of living poets from across the globe. Over one hundred poets are represented, including many of my favorite poets: Sappho, Lady Ise, Lady Izumi, Metchthild of Magdeburg, Mirabai, Barrett Browning, Dickinson, H.D., Moore, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Niedecker, Levertov, Rukeyser, Fuertes, Plath, Gregg, Glueck, Carson, and Hillman. The great joy is becoming more familiar with poets of whom I knew a little such as the group of anonymous Sanskrit poets, the Sufi poet-mystic Rabia, Hildegard of Bingen, Lalla, Sachs, and Hébert. And poets of which I knew nothing: Zi We, Sangha, Yu Xuanji, Sun Buer, Hadewijch of Brabant, Sor Violante do Céu, Bibi Hayati, Affonsina Storni, and Ruth Stone. Luckily the book includes short biographies with lists of major works so that the reader can pursue other poems by the poets who attract.
As with any anthology, there are minor quibbles. Why not more Levertov, Fuertes, and Glueck, rather than so many pages of the Bromas/Begley "Sapphics"? And where are Sitwell, Mistral, Raine, Smith, Di Prima, and Oliver—each noticeably missing? Nevertheless this and the other Barnstone anthologies are worth searching out.
This excerpt from "Nothing" by Julia de Burgos, a Puerto Rican poet who died in 1953, can best encapsulate the beauty and wonder of Voices of Light:
We come from not being and march toward not being:
nothing between two nothings, zero between two zeros,
and since between two nothings nothing can be,
let's drink to the splendor of not being our bodies.