The Creation by Bruce Beasley
"The Creation" by Bruce Beasley is a poetry collection that explores themes of divine relationship, human suffering, and the search for spiritual connection. The work is organized chronologically around narratives from the Old and New Testaments, incorporating elements of Greek mythology, history, and science. Through this eclectic mix, Beasley reflects on the complexities of creation, presenting God as a distant figure and often portraying the act of creation itself as fraught with pain and violence. The poems depict a range of experiences, from the creation of Eve to the birth of Christ, framed by the poet’s own familial struggles and losses, particularly relating to his parents' battles with alcoholism.
As the collection unfolds, it delves into the intersections of language, love, and spirituality, illustrating how human experiences can both connect and alienate individuals from the divine. The imagery used throughout the poems is often dark and somber, featuring motifs of death and decay, which serve to highlight the inherent suffering in physical existence. Ultimately, "The Creation" invites readers to consider the relationship between the sacred and the profane, urging a deeper communion with God while acknowledging the challenges posed by both language and contemporary scientific thought.
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The Creation by Bruce Beasley
First published: Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry
Core issue(s): Creation; healing; love; prayer; suffering
Overview
Bruce Beasley loosely organizes The Creation chronologically around Old and New Testament narratives and Christian rituals. In the book, which received the 1993 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award, the poet intertwines materials from Greek mythology, history, and science, and personal contemporary imagery with references to Christian myth and devotion. Beasley, a Roman Catholic with an M.F.A. and a Ph.D., publishes regularly in prestigious literary journals such as Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southern Review.
The Creation, his second volume of poetry, depicts God as an estranged father and is representative of the poet’s work. The first poem is “The Creation of Eve,” a recollection in the voice of Adam, dusted with the red of blood and seeds. This creation of Eve is portrayed as a rather violent and painful one, through the use of the verbs “hacked,” “split,” “squeezed,” “crushed,” and “splayed.” God appears distant in this poem, and both Adam and Eve are left weak and wounded by creation. Similarly, the divine Christ child, after his birth in “After an Adoration,” is described as “cold” and “helpless,” while his mother “flails her arms in her sleep.” These birth stories prepare the reader for the book’s final poem, “The Conceiving,” which narrates the impending birth of the child of the speaker of the poem. The child is welcomed to “an earth/ almost too physical to endure.” However, unlike Adam, Eve, and Christ, this newborn has a father to guide the child through the pain of earthly existence.
Poems referencing Beasley’s childhood suggest the absence of a warm parental presence. “Going Home to Georgia” announces that his parents, though now dead, suffered lives plagued by alcoholism. “The Instrument and Proper Corps of the Soule” reveals an estrangement between father and son, possibly because of the father’s “years of liquor.” However, though his mother apparently drank as well (“vodka killed her”), the poet does not experience the same estrangement from her: “Someone I love/ has wept/ for days, with no reason.” “January Thaw” is presented as an elegy to the poet’s mother and serves as a vehicle to detach himself from her, ten years after her death.
Ironically, the use of human language spiritually diminishes us, according to Beasley. “Eve, Learning to Speak” presents an Eve hesitant to use the language taught her by Adam. Eve complains, “He wanted everything/ common, reduced, so we could/ exchange it.” By the conclusion of the poem, she laments, “I’d feel the world diminishing, name by name/ as we talked through the long hours.” Similarly, “The Conceiving” indicates the poet’s own reticence: “I have always wanted to be/ anonymous, unbidden into speech/ withdrawn/ into what remnant of the spirit’s left in me.” However, language also gives us the means to pray, as demonstrated by “Utter,” a meditation on prayer.
Although winter predominates, the four seasons and liturgical calendar provide the book with a sense of movement and time. “Black Wednesday with Ashes” presents Ash Wednesday as particularly cold and dismal, with its pervading sense of spiritual loss. Easter arrives in “Longing.” Here the poet is saddened by our inability to know God through the senses. In a Christmas poem, “Noel,” the birth of Christ is overshadowed by the setting of a cemetery and the beating wings of hundreds of blackbirds.
Death permeates The Creation. “Eternal Spring” recalls the day of a miscarriage. Starting with the image of a slaughtered cow’s brain, “The Instrument and Proper Corps of the Soule” recounts the death of the poet’s mother. Through the voice of Orpheus, Beasley travels to the underworld in “Eurydice in Hades.” In addition, the book includes two elegies and numerous images of ash, burial, and various stages of rot and decay. Creation itself demands a corresponding death in that a physical creation results in a spiritual death or diminishment. As the poet argues in “Consolation,” “to be full of created things/ is to be empty of God.” In “The Conceiving,” he warns, “This life of the body, this ceaseless prayer . . . costs distance, and diminishment.”
Not having traveled such distance, the child, unlike the adult, attains some link to the spiritual in Beasley’s work. A poem about Sunday School, “Sins,” reminds us that “only/ children [can] enter/ the Kingdom of Heaven.” The young boys in “Tracing the Angel” show no lack of faith. The boy who wins the prize for best drawing spins and sings, “I see heaven,/ I see God.” In contrast, the adult, having “hardened into form,” can only pray, “Savior,/ stranger, enter me again.”
Human intelligence and the use of reason also distinguish the child from the adult. These faculties give us the freedom to view the world as either sacred or profane. As Beasley argues in “Doxology,” “Only we have the soul/ to reject you . . . and only we have the intelligence to expose you/ in the workings of what you’ve made.” Early scientists, for the most part, still found a deep connection to religion. As Beasley suggests in “Consolation,” “In Natural Theology, William Paley/ detected God’s omnipotence/ everywhere. . . . Everything surrendered God to him.” However, contemporary science more often alienates us from God. The absence of mystery tends to distance us from the spiritual. As Beasley accuses in “Longing,” “We bleed/ the world of mystery, settle/ among its elements instead.”
Christian Themes
The poems collected in The Creation can be read as an extended prayer, a plea for healing. Creation results in a wound, and physical existence itself is equated with suffering. God, as Father, is addressed directly throughout the volume, most notably in the first poem, “The Creation of Eve.” However, the relationship between God and the speaker of these poems is one of great distance. This is a transcendent God. God and poet communicate only through dreams. Although we know that the poet dreams of interacting with God, poems such as “Utter” and “Zeta Hercules” leave us to wonder if God ever hears the poet at such a distance. Ironically, love, rather than healing us, only serves to wound us more deeply, according to Beasley. Love serves to attach us to the earth and worldly things; hence, it diminishes us spiritually. This particular vision of love seems more Buddhist than Christian.
The physical and spiritual landscape of Beasley’s poems is cold and harsh. Things often appear “lopsided,” while God (in reference to Saint Augustine) is compared to a circle. The colors red and black dominate the imagery, though occasionally, a hint of heavenly blue or pink tints the landscape with hope. Although a dove appears once, in remembrance of a childhood lesson about Noah, blackbirds occur more often. In “Sleeping in Santo Spirito,” even the wings of an angel are black, and accusatory religious authority greets the poet harshly.
From Beasley’s bleak poetic landscape, we hear a voice crying for immanence and the ability to experience God through the senses. So, in addition to a prayer for healing, these poems might be read as a call for scientific evidence of the spiritual, a return to the historical perspective of Paley. Furthermore, they can be read as a plea for direct communion with God rather than a relationship though memory or dream. The experience itself would provide healing, Beasley suggests. Reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Beasley perceives language as defective, and Beasley prays for the ability to use language more purely, possibly to serve God, the Father, more worthily.
Sources for Further Study
Beasley, Bruce. The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. A collection of poems that contains some from The Creation. Provides an overview of the poet’s work through his poetry. Contains some information about the author.
“Bruce Beasley.” Contemporary Authors Online. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2007. Provides an overview of Beasley’s first four volumes of poetry. Includes biographical details and a bibliography.
Platt, Donald. Review of Summer Mystagogia, by Bruce Beasley. Christianity & Literature 47 (1997): 114-116. Although Platt describes the poetry of Beasley as largely poststructuralist, he compares it to the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and the religious poets John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Wallenstein, B. Review of The Creation. Choice 32, no. 2 (1994): 278. Wallenstein suggests that The Creation, though centered in Christian imagery and themes, will appeal to an audience of non-Christian readers as well.