In 'Helping the Morning,' Jeanne Murray Walker steps forward as a major poet

Helping the Morning

nolead begins New and Selected Poems nolead ends nolead begins

By Jeanne Murray Walker

WordFarm. 273 pp. $22 nolead ends

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

nolead ends There is little point in beating around the bush: Jeanne Murray Walker's Helping the Morning is an outstanding collection of poems.

In an afterword titled "Why Read Poetry?," Walker writes that "what really baffles me is why I am so prone to do exactly what I don't want to do. And I don't get why we humans keep opting for war. Other mysteries drive me crazy, too." They prompt, she says, "the questions that finally drive me to God."

As with any living faith, that on display here has little to do with theological abstractions and everything to do with everyday reality. "Myth" begins, "I am thinking of those who never lost faith/when the Brontosaurus unlatched from facts . . ." Those would be the ones "who still loved him . . . /Who had grown fond of the tiny head/he holds up like a lantern to light him through the gallery," and would include "the tiny woman with a hump back" who climbs a ladder every night to dust him off, and the scientist who is "proud as a father of having made the whole thing up."

Among them is the boy "launching a yellow brontosaurus/balloon and watching the fat idea he loves/mingling in the sky with other noble ideas."

In "At the Edge," the speaker says, "You'd think God/would be enough," admitting that "sometimes I venture to the edge . . . learning/how much of what goes on we can't hear." But let's not forget: That may be a mouse in the rafters. The speaker remembers "how scientists have found mice sing. . . . But in a range/too high for the human ear," just as solace must seem to those who mourn.

The speaker in "Domestic Violence" reminds herself, "Do unto others/as I would have done to me," only to wonder:

but what do I want?

Oh, maybe some of what we want is simple. . . .

But what about/the parents who moved to Lockerbie

so that every morning they could see where

their daughter fell burning from the Pan Am jet?

A sacrament is an outward sign of God's grace. Many of the poems in Helping the Morning display a quality that can fairly be called sacramental. Jeanne Murray Walker is a major poet.

Frank Wilson is a retired Inquirer book editor. Visit his blog Books, Inq. - The Epilogue. E-mail him at PresterFrank@gmail.com.