"Incandescent with your love"

My short review of Laura Reece Hogan's "Litany of Flights"

You know when you finish a great book and need to tell others about it?

That happened to me after I recently read a collection of poems titled Litany of Flights by the contemporary poet Laura Reece Hogan. Consider this short review my formal recommendation 📚

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In Litany of Flights, Laura Reece Hogan offers an ascending vision of life in a fraught and fiery world. Against the sometimes-metaphorical, sometimes-literal Southern California wildfires of her surroundings, Hogan juxtaposes the all-consuming fire of God’s presence—that “Inferno of a thousand suns” (76) whose incandescent love sends human hearts soaring.

Fundamentally, Litany of Flights is about the phoenix’s rise from its ashes, to borrow a trope the collection itself only skirts around. As a collection, though, every poem here dares to carry its own weight, improvising upon Hogan’s central motifs of fire, flight, adoration, vision, and intimacy. After personally perusing several “collected” volumes of poetry lately, this reader found the thematic unity of Litany of Flights among its top achievements. The whole is greater than the sum of its poems.

Even so, the collection is not without its outliers, such as “Water-Walkers,” which  stands in contrast to all the fiery imagery of surrounding poems by its title alone. The poem illustrates Hogan’s measured free-verse style and attention to the natural world via couplets. Here, however, the context is a swimming pool, not a burning sky or house.

And the subject is neither bird nor angel, but: “The particular value of a curl of a brown leaf you find / hard to explain” (48). As the speaker wades in the water, she observes how the leaf casts a unique shadow on the bottom of the pool, “a shaped shade of heart.” Even as it glides toward its destruction in the pool’s filter mechanism, she sees in the heart-shadow a cause for rejoicing, for “leaf and sunlight / water and breeze conspire to utter a message of hope / in the not-hope.” Hope in the not-hope is a message very much in keeping with the majority of poems of this collection.

Here as elsewhere, Hogan reminds us that hope can often be found in surprising and otherwise insignificant places. “Water-Walkers” thus measures up to one timeless standard of great poetry: to disclose the glory of the ordinary. But that is not exactly its greatest strength, in my view. It is rather Hogan’s remarkable capacities for restraint and sustain with respect to her subject matter that shine in “Water-Walkers.” Here’s what I mean…

In total, the poem consists of ten couplets, twenty lines. That leaves ample space, in theory, for the speaker to meander, rant, or philosophize. But Hogan will have nothing of it; she keeps the entire poem focused on the singular image of the leaf and its heart-shaped shadow drifting across the pool. This move forces her to get specific in her descriptions of such a humble scene:

“The curve of the veined skin / will soften in its sinking, taking on the heavy water / capsize in the course of things.”

Yet the poem never collapses into pedantry; it simply finishes feeling full, thorough, complete: “may you float light, fasten dark to the bedrock.” I believe that’s called sticking the landing. 

To be honest, the focal sustain across Litany of Flights makes me, a writer of poems, envious of Hogan. It reveals levels of intellectual and imaginative endurance that I find challenging to sustain when writing. It is hardly a challenge for a poet to describe some beautiful or awful scene according to its basic contours: the particular angle of light, the types of trees around, the scent of the wind, and so on. But sharpening and limiting the scope of an entire poem takes discipline, first to refuse any unnecessary fluff, and second to do justice to each element that does make the cut, so to speak. Many of Hogan’s poems demonstrate just this studied self-restraint, and they exert tremendous force on us readers as a consequence.

“Torchlight” is another example, this time an extended metaphor from top to bottom, comparing bright maple trees in fall to “Divine torches” that “burn with delight” by God’s design (75). No unneeded details or mixing of metaphors—just (“just”) a fresh variation on an ancient theme: dying autumnal trees that “dream of the hand that / kindles, stokes fire, / brings to life again.”

Hogan’s sustain in such poems silences my only potential complaint about the collection as a whole, which is that some of its subjects lack originality (trees, flowers, birds). But that is not a criticism I hold deeply enough to defend. The vigor and vim of these verses—their form, cadence, and voice—remind us that utter originality can be overrated. Better to give oneself to the disciplines of craft. 

More importantly, Litany of Flights reminds us of a holy love that burns brighter and hotter and longer than all the tribulations of this scorched earth. The day may be “hammered” with abrupt losses. But “Moses found you in the cloud / and his face / burned incandescent with your love.” 

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Hogan, Laura Reece. Litany of Flights: Poems. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press. 2020.