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- Bells in the night : poems by Richard Betz / by Betz, Richard,author.;
Perfect pitch -- Splitting oak -- Shore path, Bar Harbor, Maine -- The white peacock -- Stonework -- The painter -- Miller cemetery -- Toad on the walkway -- Maundy Thursday -- Bells in the night -- Going out to watch the stars -- The empire of the eye -- Branch drop -- The way to heaven is broad and catholic -- Ode to azomite -- The undiscovered poems of Han-Shan -- Old Salem -- Poor Stephen -- Wachet auf -- A soft target -- Violet -- Broken beyond repair -- Sea glass -- Cervices -- A daughter -- Peace and plenty -- Far off Hatteras Point -- Nets flung wide -- The sweetness of doing nothing -- Just above the surface -- The birder -- The poem I wish I could write -- Where to begin again -- Petal fall -- Little craft -- Last week in October at the Outer Banks -- Running over a squirrel -- The near journey -- The history of sight -- Another funeral -- Two haikus -- Morning glory: a song of innocence -- The umbrellas of the morticians -- The black snake on the windowsill -- The upward trail -- The king of metaphor -- Fragments for another day -- Revival -- Cleaning out the culvert at Hidden Springs Lane -- Pruning the apple trees -- Deer crossing -- Betula lenta -- Mercy -- Easels in the garden -- The freighter -- Picking blackberries on Yellow Mountain Road -- Cherohala skyway -- The principles of photography -- Santeetlah lake -- On one's daughter reading Milosz -- The ages of man -- Fourth of July -- Savannah -- Lake Tohopekaliga -- Drought in July -- Summer nights -- Building walls -- A long summer -- Learning to pay attention -- Down east food -- Pickles -- Read me from the book of glory -- Read me from the book of glory (music) -- Witness -- Sleight of moon -- Sermons in stone -- Gardener's confession -- Sowing winter rye -- Farewell to Arrowood Road -- October light -- Autumn piece -- Wide awake -- The wrong things -- November -- December -- The blessing of the snow shovels -- Clear ice -- Five egrets descending in snow -- The ice storm -- A hard winter -- Christmas poems.Bells in the Night spans the seasons from January to December and distances from New England to the Blue Ridge Mountains and Outer Banks of North Carolina. In the words of Randolph Shaffner, who wrote the Foreword for the book, Richard Betz writes about our mortality and the frailty of life - "Life sings through our veins and unbalances us." Yet it's this very frailty that attracts him to each precious moment to be savored before it's gone, "pinching up every crumb of day" with "the taste of the purely physical on the tip of my tongue." It's what the Japanese call Ichi-go ichi-e (treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment). In his companion poems "Stonework" and "Building Walls" he laments with nostalgia the loss that comes with the passage of time. "Work that endures" yields to "hard work and little to show for it." The same holds for words, which "skitter and slip like living things, like the dappled sunlight under these trees that shift and change when the wind blows." What he used to think he was good at, he still strives to achieve: "to enclose some small holy space," which he hopes to preserve in a poem. He writes of a rainy day at the beach with Il dolce far niente (the sweetness of nothing to do), of fishing as a glorious waste of time, hands filled to overflowing with blackberries, the day-darkness of blindness, sand dollars broken into change, and the high bright cerulean sky. His poems ring with the clink of cowbells, the clang of a hemlock branch on a metal roof, tick-tock crickets, the soft fall of a poplar petal into a cobweb, the rasping and screeching of iron on iron, the whispering water of fallen mountains, and the siren song of gravity. He paints what he sees and what he doesn't, the visible and the invisible, beyond the margin of sight. His easel is filled with images of twig-legged shore birds, braids of foam, wind ripples of sand, pelicans stitching up waves, and the rumpled sea, of a black snake on a windowsill, the ghostly blue lights of condo windows jumping with televisions, and the vast emptiness of a January sky. His poems struggle with contradictions, as he confesses, "I learned to live with paradox." In seeking passageways from one world to the next, from doubt to faith, he writes of birth and death, the squaring off of religion and philosophy, the shedding of our belongings, blindness as a dilemma for the theologian, and the bewildered Lazarus stumbling unbound amongst us. He finds inspiration for his poems in the Bible and Karl Barth, in the haiku, the poems of the Chinese Taoist Han-Shan, the plays of Shakespeare, Homer's Odyssey, the poetry of the Polish-American Milosz, the songwriter Leonard Cohen, the artwork of the Japanese designer Ohara Koson, even the Japanese chef Masa Takayama, and Yogi Berra. He writes with a delicate gentleness when he describes his daughter at birth, having "kissed the softest forehead my lips have known, and watched two eyes drift quizzically across mine." He writes with a merciless honesty when he describes the unkind, broken world of "The Wrong Things" and the raw, bitter, icy winter warmed only by candlelight at Christmas. He uses metaphor as a subtle tool of understanding, making it hard to tell "where metaphor ends and rock begins." Yet all his poems strive for the glorious insomnia of complete wakefulness, a waking up to the glories of nature but also to the glory of an oncologist's report that reduces a merciful day "to such absolute joy."- Subjects: Poetry.;
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