Author Wendell Berry wrote that although “[t]he poem is important,” it is never as important as “the people / whose survival it serves.” Pamela Porter’s recent collection, Cathedral, fulfills Berry’s dictum. In this collection, Porter takes readers on a journey to troubled areas of Africa and South America, attempts to understand the lives of people she encounters, and arrives at a deeper understanding of the responsibilities of all humans.

Refusing to indulge in sensationalism, Porter uses the harsh realities she witnesses to create a backdrop to the lives of people in these regions. For example, in “Uprising” the local children play with bird-like toys they have assembled from “scraps of cloth / from the floor of the seamstress’ hut,” and these toys “almost, almost / took flight” (24-25), implying that although these children are filled with the wonder of life and beauty, they probably will not be able to completely escape the cultural forces that limit their lives. In several poems, after focusing upon the joys and dreams of specific individuals, Porter allows the threatening elements of their larger reality to re-enter. “Nameless,” a poem narrated in the voice of a physically handicapped girl, focuses upon the girl’s determination to overcome her handicap, but the poem turns in its closing to reveal that the girl is determined to be valued by her culture, a culture that measures her only by how much water and wood she can carry (22-23).

Ultimately, however, Porter looks beyond tragedy to celebrate people and their ability to build lives in a troubled world. Several poems, filled with color and imagery, celebrate the beauty and joy these people create for themselves. Porter announces in the opening line of “Happiness in Ghana” that “[t]he morning is a new egg” and then admires a young neighbor girl’s braids that are “erupting like fountains all over her head,” the sandals of all colors that a street vendor has packed in a box, and empty pop bottles dancing in a bicycle crate (14-15). In “Pano Women,” as she describes the women who go door to door selling the fabrics stacked high upon their heads, Porter is mesmerized by cloth patterned with “Papaya birds [. . .] in a turquoise sky” and cloth with “a line of thatched-roofed huts” that “sits quietly in a corn-coloured day” (44). Such scenes of delight, although perhaps romanticized somewhat by the outsider narrator, are indicative of the key point Porter makes about the people in these troubled lands: they are resilient and they create and embrace life even as they are surrounded by hardship and by shadows of death.

Perhaps this collection’s most admirable feature is that Porter attempts to come to terms with her experiences. Witnessing hunger and poverty, Porter tries to make an immediate difference by delivering soup to street children, making unnecessary purchases from street vendors, and hiring unnecessary employees (26-27; 28; 77). Although she recognizes that the problems are larger than such actions, she refuses to be paralyzed by guilt or shame, and, instead, defines her duty and learns to live more responsibly. This emotional and moral journey is summarized in “In Reply to Your Letter Which Arrived in Just 36 Days.” In this poem, Porter has returned to her Canadian home and is responding to a letter sent to her by an African villager. Her African friend asks for a camera and a washing machine. In reply, Porter recalls both the joys of the village, such as the street vendors and the children singing in school, and its sorrows, such as the malaria and the orphan children “who now mother their brothers and sisters.” Recognizing her relative opulence, Porter forwards her camera and washing machine and rejoices in her ability and willingness to sacrifice these material goods: “I will look into the sky and feel cleansed down to my soul” (85-86).  

Porter occasionally constructs a trite phrase, such as the “thin river of blood” that oozes from a goat that is being butchered or “roosters crowing like crazy,” but these faults are eclipsed by her many fine moments (21; 67). For example, in “Sestina: Museum of Grief” she advises, “Forgive the nothing you could do”; in “Minue Triste,” a poem addressing a son lost to miscarriage, she states, “the idea of you turns six”; and in “The Wild Onions” she suggests that sometimes we must accept reality “and call it peace” (31-32; 52; 81-82). This collection offers peace, at least peace for the soul, demonstrating the power of poetry to translate experiences into a better self, and by doing so, Porter’s poetry serves not only the people whose lives it depicts, it also contributes to the moral survival of its readers.

PHILLIP HOWERTON
North Arkansas College