Ghost Pain by Sydney Lea

First published: Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2005

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Autobiography; lyric poetry; narrative poetry

Core issue(s): Awakening; illumination

Overview

Sydney Lea’s primary subject, although not his only concern, is the spiritual component of a life in a world ordered by a questioning but committed Christian perspective. The title poems for the three sections of Ghost Pain, “Was Blind But Now,” “A Man Walked Out,” and “Broken Haven,” each suggest significant elements of Christian culture and are linked to poems within each section that establish the section’s direction and mood. Lea’s selection of a familiar phrase such as “a man walked out” indicates a poetic strategy that joins a venerable religious motif with a contemporary sensibility and that blends traditional styles of religious expression with a range of language that includes formal poetic diction and the available vernacular of American speech.

To introduce the poems in Ghost Pain, Lea uses “The Author in March,” an invitation to the reader to join the author “by a smutted stove in his nook” as he “imagines a book” that will attempt to discover and understand “a counter-story,” the distillation of his life’s wisdom and interests in the maturity of his poetic journey. The setting of the poem in italics suggests Lea is confiding something, and the use of a word like “smutted,” a phrase like “a splotch of a town,” and an image of animals “poking their hungry maws” combine to create a mood of comfortable intimacy. Settled in a home that is a refuge from the “runes of professional fear,” the philosophical framework that his solid intellectual experience has assembled, the author is prepared to examine how his essential faith is as much an expression of uncertainty as of conviction. The poem concludes with the open-ended address, “How might he truly begin?” which leads to the first section,“Was Blind But Now,” the enduring declaration from the song “Amazing Grace.”

The title poem, however, is not the first poem in the section but instead is the next to last. The section begins by recalling, in “1959,” an important moment from the poet’s adolescence when as a “slightly fat, slightly handsome kid,/ sixteen, on scholarship, away/ from the new hegemon” in France, he experiences an epiphany on the shore at St. Jean de Luz. There, were the passage of time to totally stop, “To make a soul—I could tell!—would be so easy.” This indelible perception sets the course of a spiritual life and, by contrast, establishes a vision that is dramatically different from the world that the young man is about to enter.

The poems that follow delineate the quotidian world that the poet recalls—a world replete with disappointment and imperfection, which function as a challenge to the poet’s capacity to maintain faith and as a test of his ability as an artist to find an adequate response in his work to the disappointments inevitable in an adult’s life. “Gradus ad Parnassum,” “Blues in Another Time,” and “Nowhere” posit the awkward uncertainties of love. “Evening Walk as the School Year Starts” depicts an ominous, pervasive darkness by describing a man who has been the subject of a lobotomy and is bedeviled by “a whipsaw of hateful passion.” “November Out His Window” asks if a modern medical miracle (the restoration of sight) is sufficient compensation for the wages of age. As an epitome of loss, “Epidemic” is a catalogue of suffering, which the poet recoils from in an impulse of retreat. “Don’t talk, I say to myself in vain,” knowing that poetic speech is the only recourse available. The title poem, “Was Blind But Now,” is presented as an extended narrative, nine seven-line stanzas, each line dense with detail. The poem is offered as an experience of transcendence: “. . . can I say from that moment/ I never again gazed down from The Lookout in snow or calm or rain/ the same?” His assessment is “I don’t know,” but the power of the story is given by the meditative conclusion: “His memory is/ For me his memory is/ His memory for me.”

The poem that closes the first section, “Football Against the School for the Deaf,” is a plunge “back over forty years” into active engagement as the poet returns the angry force of an opponent with his own rage, still trying to find his way into “the mind of a man” as a means of partial penance.

These poems enumerate the world that shaped the author in his early years. The second section of the book, “A Man Walked Out,” was conceived as a sequence. It begins with the poem “A Man Walked Into a Bar,” then continues with poems bearing first lines that are variants of the section title, such as “A man walked out much later into something awful”; “The man walked out again into was-it-dream”; “A man walked out into concupiscence”; “The man walks jelly-legged out onto his porch from a dream”; and eventually “A man drove home at nine in the evening.” The man, who clearly bears a resemblance to the author as an adult, is on a pilgimmage through a grim world that continually tests him, challenging him to resist some of his worst tendencies: anger, lust, and several forms of self-destructive behavior paramount among them. The places he walks into are hellish, and in “666: Father of Lies,” he meets the devil, who might be as much a projection of psychic impulses as anything else. The second section concludes with “Noon for Good” as the “Man walked out on Sunday,” seeking salvation in the many wonders of the natural world.

The title of the collection, “Ghost Pain,” launches the third section as a response to the author’s query about and hope for a “counter-story” in “The Author in March.” The infernal realm that the man has walked through is harsh enough, but in addition to the torment of his own objectionable behavior, he is haunted by gripping images of friends lost to illness and death. The thrust of the third section, “Broken Haven,” is toward the restoration of a literal and spiritual refuge. The path taken is objectified by a four-poem grouping, “Suite in Mudtime,” poems written in couplets that continue the powerfully evocative vision of the natural world as an available paradise begun in “Noon for Good.” The book is brought to a close with “Transport,” the title signifying a geographic extension (to Switzerland), a psychic transference (to a condition of grace), and an individual transcendence (beyond and away from his personal demons).

Christian Themes

For Lea the concept of a “counter-story” is inherent in the sin-struck nature of human life, and the possibility of redemption is crucial to his belief that salvation is never completely beyond the reach of humans. It is necessary for him to delineate, with as much power as he can summon, the pain and torment of human existence so that he can demonstrate the strength of a faith that can counter this. His youthful expectation that “to make a soul—I could tell!—would be so easy” has been confounded, but the degree of difficulty has made the process worth much more. Throughout Ghost Pain, Lea has placed sufficient signs of his faith, as in the quote from Psalm 40, “—and He hath put a new song in my mouth,” which indicates a feeling of hope amid the darkest circumstances that sustains the man who “walked out” when he asks plaintively, “Where in hell’s the justice?”

This is most apparent in the third section in “Broken Haven.” The personal failures that have damaged his family are repaired by moments such as his feeling pride in his daughter when she “performed ’One Little Candle’ at the start of the service,” an occasion that is summarized by his declaration that “we have to believe” because “If God be for me, whom then shall I fear?” This belief stems from a conviction that there is “one more safe tiny place amid the great unsafe.” Lea creates powerful lyric evocations of this small secure spot in poems such as “Talent from Birth,” with its vision of how “Everything out in the Yankee woods/ recalled the hour of its creation”; “Children, Singing,” with its pleasure in “The center of a universe now blessed,/ A childlight charging every note and rest”; “Noon for Good,” with its plea “Make me to hear joy and gladness that the bones/ which thou hast broken may rejoice.” These enable the poet to reach for (in “Suite in Mudtime”) a place “To linger a while. In peace,” which he now realizes is “all that I’ve wanted.”

Sources for Further Study

Baumgaertner, Jill P. “Hints of Redemption.” The Christian Century, February 21, 2006, 38-42. An informative discussion of the religious issues in Ghost Pain.

Bedell, Jack B. “Sydney Lea.” In Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Continuum, 1999. Good background information on Lea’s work.

Giordano, Marie Jordan. “An Interview with Sydney Lea.” The Writer’s Chronicle, September, 2004. An extensive, detailed discussion with Lea, covering his themes, influences, and methods of composition.

“Lea, Sydney.” In American Poets Since World War II, Third Series. Vol. 120 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1992. A biography of the poet and discussion of his works.