By Bill Cushing
I knew of Kevin Bezner several years before meeting him in 1987, having followed his writing before encountering him in person. His poetry began being published in book form at the start of the nineties, and for those who have never read him, his latest work, Following the Light, serves as both an overview of his work past and present as well as a look at his evolution as a person and a soul in search of his place in the world.
Divided into sections named after the books from which the selected works were originally published, the works in this “anthology” deal with nature and mankind, the temporal and the spiritual, an aspect of Bezner’s being that is all the more interesting given his return to the Church and his pursuit of a place within its hierarchy.
Beginning with 1993’s About Water, the poet views this collection of work as one that is “the result of reflection that at first resembled and then later became a form of meditation and prayer.” With his later return to the faith of his youth, he now dedicates a significant portion of his life to prayer—both monastic and meditative, so it is not a surprise that his 1999 poem “Prayer” seems to reflect influences of other New England poets such as Robert Creeley while also prefacing his life as it is today:
All steps,
all moves
each spoon lifted
to the mouth,
every said word,
all thought.
And those New England roots are present all around, as he notes in the title poem from his book About Water:
I will never actually leave
These rocks or water in gray
New England, darkness coming on.
Note the influences of other regional poets, such as Robert Frost, in pieces like “Farm” or the attraction he has to “the beauty of the natural world.” One segment of the natural that has always captured Bezner’s attention—similar to many other poets—are observations of birds and their world. And here the aviary world is at the forefront. Besides the simply titled “Birds” (a poem I have always favored as one of his best), and the surrounding pieces “Vulture” and “The Sparrow” as well as a multitude of ornithological images in “Summer Rain.” Yet, as Bezner confesses, “the more I came to experience the natural world, the more I was drawn to God.”
An interesting aspect of this book is seeing how Bezner’s crafting and form have gone through cycles while much of the thematic material stays fairly constant. He plays with line and meter, never settling into any “routine” while still using many of the same images whether he talks of the animal kingdom or the Heavenly Kingdom. It can be seen in the similarities in both structure and approach between the opening poem (“The Earth Does Not Need Us”) and the piece that opens his newer works (“Storm”). Note how couplets such as:
Light of
yellowed
maple all down
the street
compare to their later counterparts in “Storm:”
The air is thick
with hundreds of acorns,
the treetops heavy
with cacophonous birds.
Even the titles maintain a consistency, seen in the second works of each section, the earlier “When Evening Comes, Winter” and the later “Winter Nights.” Yet this is not to say that the work is unyielding; in fact, it is anything but that. There are many Catholic-themed pieces here such as “Lilacs in Bloom,” “Poem for Mary Magdalene,” or “Bread of Life,” but there are also a fair number of pieces dealing with reflection and understanding, a task that Bezner seems to have set before himself in later years based on both personal and worldly experiences.
The poem “Hiking With My Old Self” works, in many ways, like a dialogue between his younger and contemporary selves or, on an earlier page, “Crossroads,” another self-conversation that opens with:
“You’re sad again,” my old self says.
Today he’s eight. He’s just come in.
However, as one might expect, the writing here is steeped in the spiritual. In “Vocation,” he recalls how “Twice you called. Twice I failed to answer,” and one encounters a deeply personal and unyielding gaze of a writer wrestling with the questions of any lifetime. He doesn’t go easy on himself either. In “Dark Days, Light,” Bezner looks back to a time:
When I was lost like Dante without a Virgil
to guide, or a Beatrice to intercede.
Watching Kevin Bezner go through the many changes he has in his life has been an interesting experience for those of us who know him on a personal level. It is as if this collection is, as it should be, the culmination of an earlier poem relating to his present. This poem named “To Have Knowledge” comes—almost ironically—from the 1997 book The Tools of Ignorance. For those who don’t know Bezner, Following the Light gives its readers a most personal look. A quarter-century ago, he was an iconoclastic atheist. As he himself admits, “I was far from God when I began writing poetry.”
Today he is a deacon in the Ukranian Catholic Church. This book details the journey from there to here, from then to now, and this work shows how, no matter how far he has gone—geographically, personally, or spiritually, Bezner knows, “I want to go back to St. Joseph’s in Fall River.”
Following the Light
By Kevin Bezner
Kaufmann Publishing (2014)
ISBN: 9780990532927