The Road to Emmaus: Poems, by Spencer Reece
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The Road to Emmaus: Poems, by Spencer Reece
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Longlisted for the National Book AwardA moving, subtle sequence of narrative poems, from a sharp new poetic voice Two strangers walk toward Emmaus. Christ has just been crucified, and they are heartbroken―until a third man joins them on the road and comforts them. Once they reach Emmaus and break bread, the pair realizes they have been walking with Christ himself. But in the moment they recognize him, he disappears. Spencer Reece draws on this tender story in his mesmerizing collection―one that fearlessly confronts love and its loss, despair and its consolation, and faith in all of its various guises.
Reece's central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With language of simple, lyrical beauty that gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small moments: the speaker, living among a group of orphans, wondering "Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?"; two men finding each other at a Coming Out Group; a man trying to become visible after a life that had depended on not being seen.
A yearning for connection, an ache of loneliness, and the instant of love disappearing before our eyes haunt this long-awaited second collection from Spencer Reece.
The Road to Emmaus: Poems, by Spencer Reece- Amazon Sales Rank: #518846 in Books
- Brand: Reece, Spencer
- Published on: 2015-03-31
- Released on: 2015-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.26" h x .40" w x 5.53" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
From Booklist The most exceptional poems in this engaging collection are long and not just personal but autobiographical. The Road to Emmaus is about two men on the same journey, himself when young and his much older AA sponsor. We see Reece in counseling with an elderly nun, recalling his sole love relationship, which began when he was 39 and Joseph was 50 and lasted five years. In the prose poem, Hartford, Reece, older yet, is a hospital chaplain in the city of his birth, pondering the Jewish past of his mother’s family and traces of Wallace Stevens, Hartford’s great resident poet when it was a WASP, not a black, metropolis. And in The Upper Room, Reece shows himself studying in middle age for the Episcopal priesthood—his second crack at it, successful this time, though he is wracked by a wave of deaths in his family. With their allusive titles and citations, all four conjure a gritty world scarred by disruptions good (gay liberation) and bad (urban poverty, violence, madness) yet suffused with poetry, love, and the Gospel. --Ray Olson
Review
“For Spencer Reece, humbling is a given. Even though his language in The Road to Emmaus, his first book since his ordination, is often remarkably inventive and sometimes formally elegant, the poems' tone never betrays awareness of his achievement . . . There's a quality of devotion in all of these that can make the secular seem sacred. One can truly attend through attention, the writing suggests, and the poems manage to be unwavering--almost unvarying--in the quality of their gaze.” ―Jonathan Farmer, Slate
“Reece follows up his acclaimed first book with a gorgeous series of poems in verse and prose about a middle-aged man's coming to terms with religious faith, going as far as becoming a priest, a hospital chaplain, and a quiet chronicler of everyday suffering. 'It is correct to love even at the wrong time,' he writes of a visit to newborns in an ICU. Reece's style is straightforward, but always graceful, understatedly beautiful. These poems compassionately describe all the stops along this journey, which leads across America and elsewhere, always inviting readers to respond: 'it was an interview, much of life is an interview.'” ―Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
“The Road to Emmaus confirms why I have always looked to Reece's work not only as inspiration for my own poems, but also as a guide for my soul. In this collection I follow his every footstep as he walks toward himself-toward myself-stopping to admire or fear what we see in ourselves, in others, in each other. Each poem a portrait or a self-portrait exquisitely and painstakingly drawn along the way, by the side of that proverbial road we journey with him, encountering life in all its loneliness and wholeness, its lucidness and doubt, its bitterness and glory.” ―Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of Looking for The Gulf Motel
“These poems form a true and riveting narrative. Reading Reece makes you recall why you love poetry.” ―Annie Dillard, author of The Maytrees and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“Though many of Spencer Reece's poems move forward with the narrative punch of short stories, they are packed with poetry's exquisite insight and metaphoric brilliance. These are moral poems that speak of loneliness in terms so intimate that they seem to breech loneliness; they are both documents of isolation and manifestos of love. And they achieve such embrace via lyric bursts that are arresting, evocative, and profound.” ―Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon
“Reece's poems are at once splendidly fresh and deeply rooted in poetry's rich loam . . . Reece's striking debut yields new revelations with each reading.” ―Booklist
About the Author Spencer Reece is a poet and priest. His first collection, The Clerk's Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003. He has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. He served at the Honduran orphanage Our Little Roses, and works for the Bishop of Spain at the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Española Reformada Episcopal.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. The mystery, sadness, and glory of life By R. M. Peterson The book-jacket cover states that THE ROAD TO EMMAUS is a book of "poems". The rear inside flyleaf of the book-jacket says that Spencer Reece "is a poet and a priest". But I don't view the eighteen pieces as poems, although most are formatted as poems typically are. By and large, they are straightforward, declarative pieces about various aspects and experiences from the life of Spencer Reece and, to me, they are testaments and/or confessions.Most are presented as autobiographical. Common themes are family, estrangement and attenuated reconciliation, religion and becoming an Episcopal priest, comforting the afflicted in hospitals, prisons, and orphanages, and coming to grips with homosexuality. Many are set in New England (Cambridge, Mass.; Hartford and New Haven, Conn.) or in Florida. But beyond relating to specifics from the life of Spencer Reece, these pieces are about the mystery, sadness, and glory of life, and they exemplify the transforming power of literature to make pain and loneliness endurable.I am deeply impressed by the sincerity of Spencer Reece and how these so-called poems are neither forced nor pretentious. Nor are they arcane. I intend to return to THE ROAD TO EMMAUS in the near future -- to the entire volume, not just to some of its entries -- something quite rare in my reading experience.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A Spiritual Autobiography By Roger Brunyate The Gospel of John was right:the world holds so much life.There are not enough books to record it all.I kissed the young man on his cheek, very lightly.-- Jesus said to them: "Unbind him, and let him go."We each went our separate waysfollowing where we were being led.Marie said: "Write it down, just as it happened."These are the closing lines of "Hymn," the final poem in Spencer Reece's spare and moving collection. They really say everything that the book is about: the "so much life" that Reece crams into his pages, his unique confessional voice that manages to say freshly what many others have written about before, his identity as an older gay man, the quality of renunciation that throbs through many of these poems, his deep spirituality -- and above all, his ability to "write it down, just as it happened."Reece has been moving between writing and religion for most of his adult life. As a student at Wesleyan, he was encouraged by Annie Dillard and later by James Merrill, whose confessional poetry is an obvious influence on his own work. He then took degrees in Theology from Harvard and Yale. But for most of the middle years of his life, he worked as a clerk for the Brooks Brothers outlet at the Mall of America, an experience which provided the material for his first prizewinning collection, THE CLERK'S TALE. Then later in life, he returned to the church, and was ordained as a priest (I think Anglo-Catholic) in 2011, at the age of 48. For most of the next year, he worked with orphan girls in Honduras. So much for the facts, but the poems look deep behind them, into the writer's soul.I call this a collection of poems -- there are 18 in all -- but in fact, they are very varied in texture. Four of them are in prose, dealing with subjects such as life as a child at Oak Ridge, an elderly Holocaust survivor, work as a prison chaplain, and (the longest) a visit to the family cemetery in Hartford. Six of them are short and even lyrical, often loosely rhymed, about such subjects as love and family, but also about the suffering of ICU patients or abandoned children in a Miami shelter. This one ends with the memorable line, "Was it true, what they said, that a priest is a house lit up?" But what gives the book its gravitas and makes it seem more like a spiritual autobiography than a random collection, are the eight longer narrative poems, in mostly free verse.I do not claim to understand all of these, but two in particular shine with painful but radiant authenticity. One, "Gilgamesh," told in numerous short fragments, is the story of a great love, a five-year relationship that eventually came to an end. The other is the title poem, "The Road to Emmaus." Bible readers will know that this refers to a couple of disciples walking to a village outside Jerusalem after the Crucifixion, joined by a stranger who engages them in conversation; only at the very end do they recognize that the stranger was the risen Christ. In Reece's poem, the "stranger" is a beat-up but still dapper elderly man called Durrell, who becomes his sponsor at AA meetings. The poem is his meditation on Durrell's memory:John K., from the meetings, dead now too, once said:"Oh, I knew Durrell. He was odd. But we're all odd, you know."All I know nowis the more he loved me, the more I loved the world.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A man on his journey By Christoph Hahn At first, the tone seems rather light than heavy. Sotto voce, slightly singing, starts the journey from home to the hospital where is the chaplain. The poet-priest Spencer Reece does never bang the big drum, neither in his „The Clerk's Tale“ (published in 2004) nor in his recent book, „The Road To Emmaus“. A disciple on his way, a tema con variazioni, spread over 19 poems – and it is all somehow about the writer himself, his doubts, his faith, his journey towards ordained ministry, his coming-out and many other moments in his life. But although the author turns up in his lines as Spencer or Spencer Reece, he never gets too introspect or self-centered. He is more of a modern Orpheus, singing his song in search of humans once dear to him – Joseph, his lover, his parents and many other humans.A sound, a singing sound: That is what clings to the ears whilst reading through „The Road To Emmaus“. Sometimes, the components of this volume rather seem to be narratives. But it is the keynote Reece sets which makes the texts poems. Each one is well composed, but rather freely. But they follow a pattern, they have got rhythm because they resonate the life of the author – not always the sense of naturalism or realism, but in a more sublime way, told in a softspoken and kind mode. The poet talks gently to his reader. Of all things surrounding him, Reece talks gracefully und with great taste, tnterspersed with pearls of wisdom. Passing along the newborn in Hartford „ICU“) where he used to be a hospital chaplain, the priest-poet meditates: „It is always correct to love even at the wrong time.“ The closing lines are of similar sublimity: „On rounds, the newborn eyed me, each one/like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying/I know I would find you, I know I would lose you.“Gems like this, gems, edged and engulfed by the rest of the text, these gems alone pay the purchase of this book. „The Manhattan Project“, one of the most narratively structured poems, ends by: „Speak Father, and I will listen. And if you do not wish to speak, I will listen to that.“ „Monaco“, one of the epoi in this collection, contains another jewel: „She was what she said she was./But we are rarely what we say we are.“ But reviewing a book is not about compiling its most beautiful passages, at least not only – it is about finding how the author organizes his material alongside the structures. Spencer Reece really travels on the Road to Emmaus, he travels towards the fulfillment of his faith in his ordination to the priesthood, towards his sexual identity and many other things.
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