The Odor of Sanctity: Poetry Rising Up From Sadness

Newswise — In his newest volume of poetry, Michael Heffernan, creative writing professor at the University of Arkansas, often mixes the lofty and the wacky. The resulting "mildly irreverent" poems rise up from the sometimes-sad circumstances of life.

His book, The Odor of Sanctity, was published by Salmon Poetry of County Clare, Ireland, the publisher of two earlier volumes by Heffernan. The poems in The Odor of Sanctity often start at a difficult place " the loss of love or a loved one, for example " and end with a hint of hope.

"The idea of rising up out of a sadness seems to be something I seek," Heffernan says. "It's something the poem wrestles with and is not a tacked-on happy ending. It's a rising up."

For example, "Idaho Light" begins with pain. Then, Heffernan writes, "In northern Idaho's voluptuous dreamscape / someone had taken ordinary wheatfields / and shaken them like bedsheets tossed into the light / and brought them down in bundles of swollen gold." He observes the shadows on the hills, and ends with "I was a hole in the wind full of dark sweet birds."

Birds appear throughout the volume. They burst over rooftops, murmur from rafters and "step off the top of the cherry tree." While birds in his poems may guide in a direction or even signal revelation, Heffernan does not use them allegorically.

"To me, it's all metaphor," he says. "I like birds and their habits, their nesting ways, their songs. In a poem, they become an emblem of something that gives its own meaning."

Heffernan describes poetry as a vehicle of communication that uses language to engage with the circumstances of life.

"Language is our salvation," Heffernan says. "It is itself the age-long record of how people have dealt with problems and passed on to us what it is all about, that it's going to be okay."

The final poem in the book, "Every Journey Has an End," rose from a scrap of a dream discovered in an old dream journal, an image of a boy on a bicycle. He wondered where the boy on the bicycle was going. He begins with a mysterious encounter between two boys, perhaps doppelgangers or mutual memories, at a shabby house near a cemetery.

"I ended up in my grandmother's rooming house in Detroit, where as a kid I used to poke around in rooms when the guys were off working in the factories," Heffernan says.

The last word of the poem is "Resurrection," an unexpected ending that Heffernan "didn't see coming." Toward the end of the poem, he describes the smells in the little bedrooms, the stink of "cheap Bay Rum and old newspapers." Then come words of wisdom from the grandmother about the need to pray, "especially in mid April, / when the skies often had that look of angel feathers, / and the air smelt of the moment of the Resurrection."

The Odor of Sanctity is Heffernan's eighth book of poetry. His work has earned three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes and the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence. He is a professor in the department of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.