‘With bright wonder’

Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent
Selected With an Introduction by Jake Kennedy

Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024
$21.99 / 9781771126373

Reviewed by Sharon Thesen

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The poet Robin Blaser stated once in passing that we need to read and to write in order to become honest people. The honesty of John Lent’s writing is in that sense a double offering to the reader—his honesty predicates and predicts our own.

This is not the honesty of confessionalism or its related prideful-instructive subjectivities (which finally leave the reader cold; better the vulnerabilities inherent in Jack Spicer’s observation of poetry’s two chronic preoccupations: time and love. “Time with his big jeans / Love with his embarrassed laugh”). That’s the humble spirit of the magnificent statement that is Molecular Cathedral.

The collection brilliantly edited and introduced by the Okanagan poet Jake Kennedy (The Rublev Horse) and with a warm and generous Afterword by John Lent, is beautifully produced and made too. It is an elegant and marvellous book to read and to hold. Following a more or less chronological order of selections from Lent’s oeuvre, the book maps the emergence of an independent style of writing linked to Lent’s discernment of a sacred geometry that inheres in the world. 

The poems—often formally idiosyncratic, such as the “cantilevered” poems that start out with long lines and end up with short ones, seemingly about to topple over into what? eternity?—reflect the wobbliness inherent in any of our poetic or otherwise constructions. The vulnerability belongs to the vision but also to the world. Nothing stays in place for long in Lent’s work.

The poems move continually outward, but the genius of Lent’s work is to make that outwardness personal: “Walk out in to the kitchen’s morning / light sifting through the half-opened / smudged window and I wonder how / do these surfaces become me / become the life I lead and lead / me on.”  

Included in the collection are poems from earlier in Lent’s life—lost at times in terms of having a trajectory to follow. Vernon resident Lent was born fortunate and doomed to have been the son of his own high school English teacher in Edmonton, and he became a popular and brilliant teacher himself at Okanagan University College. His immersion in the art of teaching, as well as in the canons of modern and late- or post-modern literature of that era, imbue his poems with the intelligence and rhythms of their sentences.  

As both a teacher and a writer, Lent’s curiosity and analytical accuracy extend as much to prose as to poetry. He seems not to be that interested in finding contorted ways of expression or cultural denunciation. Love is always where his poems are heading, but, again, I distinguish from an easily-won love that is kindness and empathy. The complex love in Lent’s work reminds me, in its idiosyncratic forms as well as its preoccupations, of Blake’s “Four-Fold Vision”—a sensibility earned through joys and sufferings that Blake called “supreme delight” for the soul, as well as “Imagination.”

“Planes and dimensions” are ever-present in Lent’s poetic forms as well as their utterances. It’s as if his poetic sensibility was invented by a dream of Cubism. Awareness of “planes” of light and geometries of spatial angles seem to be the way the speaker aligns himself with meaning. It’s not a poetics you find anywhere else, except perhaps in visionary writers like Blake and one of Lent’s admired foremothers, the Canadian novelist Sheila Watson, who wrote of the stark perceptual geometries of the BC Caribou area in The Double Hook. Lent’s wife Jude Clarke is a painter whose own visual sensibility inspires the way Lent sees the light of the world. In beautiful poem after poem, Lent (A Matins Flywheel) shows us the magic of that world, its light and shapes and movement, and the longing to articulate it, as in the psalm-like title poem:

this incarnation we are,
the word made flesh, a molecular cathedral straining 
within itself, its medieval gothic balances
and counter-turns and arches and cross-bracing
its unimaginable architecture a gift
that requires selfishness as a pledge not
a betrayal of love: the harder
path even.…  

While this collection, being a selected poems, must truncate the oeuvre as a whole, Molecular Cathedral presents all the turns of Lent’s voice over a lifetime of writing, teaching, songwriting, and singing, informing the measure therein—of the song, the melody, the reaching out of the voice not only to the reader but also to something greater and even beyond words: “a geometry / that cannot be envisioned / but simply, wildly, is.”

Sharon Thesen is a Cascadian-Canadian poet, critic, and professor. Her works most recently include a selected longer poems, Refabulations, edited by Erin Moure (reviewed at BCR by Cathy Ford), a small chapbook, “Day Song,” published by Vernon’s Broke Press; and the co-editorship, with Paul Nelson, of a collection of interviews with poets, Cascadian Prophets. She lives in Lake Country, BC. [Editor’s note: Sharon Thesen has previously reviewed Stephen Collis for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)

Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster