Paul J. Pastor, The Locust Years: Poems. Wiseblood Books, 2025. $20.00. 129 pp.
Amazon, that prodigious purveyor of products, has thirty-five major categories of books in its bestseller lists. Not one of those is poetry. Despite an overall decline in reading, people still buy and read a lot of books. And yet, relatively few are books of poetry--especially poetry by a living writer. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but I will briefly note two significant transformations in the last century that shrunk the supply of high-quality work and demand for it, making poetry an overlooked sub-genre.
First, the influence of modernism produced a dramatic shift in English poetry. Modernist poets’ increasing experimentation and obscurity drove the general reader further from a direct engagement with contemporary work. The search for new means of expression led to the radical fracturing and jettisoning of established modes and forms. In the wake of modernism, poetry often ran to extremes unpalatable or uninteresting to a non-academic audience, speaking predominantly or even exclusively to a subculture of poets and critics. When readers are made to feel that a poem is a convoluted riddle or an inscrutable diary entry, it’s no surprise many have given up on poetry—or given in to the least common denominator (Instagrammable block quotes).
Another notable change in the last century was the development of sound recording and broadcast technologies. Poetry and music share a number of aesthetic delights, including rhythmic and mnemonic force. The widespread adoption of audio recording and electronic playback allowed these types of sonic pleasures to be outsourced and passively enjoyed by listening to recordings at any time and place. The practice of reading aloud or reciting a poem to someone else in the same room has been virtually eliminated from our culture—with the exception of the lingering but declining custom of reading picture books to small children).
And so, most readers don’t think much about poetry anymore. The determination of many talented writers to obfuscate their work while abandoning the basic aural attractiveness of verse left an aesthetic void. Recorded popular music and other media have attempted to fill it. The long-standing appeal of poetry has been carried on by artists such as Bob Dylan, who was confusingly but perhaps appropriately awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the last seventy-five years, innumerable would-be poets instead became singer-songwriters or rappers, leaving the academic and esoteric flavors of poetry to proliferate, largely unnoticed. Robert Frost is likely the most widely remembered poet of the twentieth century, and his best-known work uses the charm of meter and rhyme to compellingly convey elemental ideas and experiences. Frost died in 1963 (the same year as the release of Bob Dylan’s breakthrough second album), and in the ensuing decades a relatively small but steady succession of poets has continued to steward the enduring pleasures of poetry in contemporary idioms, but the public has generally looked elsewhere for artistic satisfaction. Sure, Mary Oliver also holds a certain cultural cachet, and her work has its merits, but how many people have memorized a complete Mary Oliver poem?
One of the chief rewards poetry can still offer is a neat encapsulation of sound and sense that can be spoken, heard, or read by almost anyone, without the aid of electricity or other technology—without even a printed page, when committed to memory. A poem’s core insight may be something simple that we already know; a poem’s magic is its ability to lodge in the mind and heart, helping us hang on to something we might otherwise forget. In the words of Wendell Berry, “poetry may serve at once to make memorable and to determine what should be remembered.” But so much contemporary poetry has failed to be memorable and to take up worthwhile and lasting concerns. It will require some effort to reach the many readers who have dismissed poetry and connect them with the good work still being written today.
This brings us to the book at hand: Paul Pastor’s The Locust Years. This is one of a small number of recent poetry collections that I would recommend to those who may be reluctant about approaching poetry. (I would also recommend it to those who already enjoy poetry, but they will need less convincing.) Pastor aims at the widest possible audience without sacrificing artistic integrity. The result is a book that speaks not only to the literary-minded but to any thoughtful reader, not by presenting watered-down fluff, but by forging new poetic gems from the oldest mines. Some of these poems strive toward the indelible, classic quality of Frost’s best-known poems, though Pastor’s work is more distinctively Christian. Instead of a beautiful but bleak materialistic cosmos, Pastor’s poems see the wonder of a ravaged universe held together by love, recounting the Biblical vision of redemption through suffering; the promise of new life through death.
Pastor began as a poet writing primarily (and quite capably) in free verse, but his second book marks a pronounced turn toward using more meter and rhyme. Pastor completed an M.F.A. in poetry under the direction of James Matthew Wilson, one of the foremost teachers and advocates for the craft of verse with the traditional tools of meter and rhyme, and The Locust Years is well served by this expanded palette. While poetic skill is undeniably important, it will fall short without a worthy subject matter. In this regard, Pastor also delivers, with poems rich in meaning and wisdom, probing and illuminating the mysteries of the human experience.
As a first sample, take “The Hope of Tears,” a wonderful exemplar of the potent brevity and clarity of a well-crafted epigram:
We see the world with half-formed eyes and think
The world half-formed; that night falls when we blink.
Tears will wash the lens. The wise man’s light
Is salt and hot. It makes each shadow bright.
This poem packs a coherent idea in a tidy and enchanting little container that makes it instantly memorable, attracting the mind to ruminate on the nuances (such as the subtle scriptural allusion to the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida) and to contemplate how this concept could apply to one’s own life (what might be misconstrued due to limitations of perception, and how might sorrow help remedy such deficiencies?).
In his endorsement of the book, Malcolm Guite notes a resemblance to the work of William Blake, an apt comparison given the musical vigor of these poems spiced with prophetic proclamations, mystical visions, cosmic concerns, and even touches of social commentary. Pastor takes up Blake’s call to cleanse “the doors of perception,” so that “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
Throughout this collection, attentive observation of the natural world provides plentiful imagery and metaphor: “the fawn’s green rib blooms fungus in the rain”; “Lenten Roses bow like fasting souls”; “ants perform their gamelan on neat bamboo”; “each green leaf / contains a billion mouths, which spin, which open, / hungry under sun.” Pastor’s deep roots in rural Oregon are evident in lines like these:
Lichens droop from spruces, wizard-gray,
there are yet handsome gambles in the living game;
rain still rains.
At other times, Pastor adopts the (apparent) simplicity of the cadence and language of nursery rhymes, to ponder the paradoxes of life in a world charged with glory and agony:
The light, the low,
The stooped, the slow,
The way that ferns and crystals grow.
The harsh, the kind,
The marsh, the mind,
The kingdoms that the children find.
Questions regarding the existence and meaning of suffering are central to the collection, drawing from Christ’s saying about the grain of wheat that must “fall into the ground and die” in order to bear fruit, as well as the astonishing promise of God in Joel 2:25 to restore “the years that the locust hath eaten.” The title poem is a moving address from a father to his son, imparting wisdom and sketching a vision of the future through the long vicissitudes of life. It begins:
My son, there is no fairness in the years,
No paid deserving. Nothing but the gift
Gone forth, gone sideways. Nothing but the pain
Of wandering, trying all within the locust years.
Unflinching in foretelling the difficulty and debris of days to come, the poem nevertheless ends with a redemptive image of father and son pressing fresh cider: “sweetness fills the pot / as press lets forth our froth, as we both laugh and crank, / and crush the gift to toast our locust years.”
“I have visited the country on the other side of grief,” begins one poem, and grief recurs throughout, but not in a diaristic sense. There is an abundance of precise language and vivid detail, yet the specific nature of the grief is kept intentionally murky (not generic), extending an invitation for readers to enter into these universal considerations from their own unique perspectives. Another short poem, “Staying,” employs an extended metaphor to trace the tension of temporality and bereavement, giving fresh expression to a common experience:
That clock whose long hand is the setting sun,
Whose short hand is the moon, whose face the sky,
Whose gears are wound each year by God’s bright key,
Which chimes each spring with birds sprung from the tree,
That clock whose pendulum inscribes the sea,
Has stopped for you, dear one. But not for me.
Each of us must at some point face the abyss of pain and sorrow and decide whether to keep trusting in the good when “hope and folly’s boundary lines are thin.” The whole world, and each of our inner worlds, must be shaken and tested. In these moments when reason and logic are poor comforters, the music of poetry may resonate with greater power. Pastor’s piercing poems help awaken us to the ultimate nature of reality.
No one says what breaks us in the end,
But break we will, in sharpened basalt angles.
And all our time is coming down to this—
As our hearts shed their rock, we comfort angels.
Not every piece will speak clearly and effectively to everyone, as is to be expected because of the variety of human personality and circumstance. Although Pastor’s poems are generally accessible, some can be challenging and even a bit knotty at times. There is always a place for mystery in poetry, but there can be a slim line between mystery and obscurity, and some readers may be less inclined toward the stretches of more enigmatic language or the sometimes extravagant vocabulary and verbose poem titles. Most of the poems are brief (occupying a single page), so if a reader is initially put off by a particular piece, he or she can move on to the next and likely find something to grasp and stay invested. The vast majority of these poems offer some sort of payoff in vibrant word-music and rich insights, even if it takes multiple engagements to attain their treasures.
For another example of a successful marriage of sound and meaning, consider “The Alembic” (an old term for a type of distillation apparatus). The final line maintains the regular iambic pentameter while demonstrating how a metrical line’s rhythm can be heavily modulated to serve the poem’s purpose—in this case, to figure the slowing trickle of a peculiar subterranean brew:
There waits the perfect spirit of the world,
Whose alembic is loss, whose still is time,
And whose keen drip we even now can hear:
Below, below, below. Be low. Be. Low.
As in the above, repetition is often used fruitfully, including the echo-rhymes of “Who Has Been a Friend?” and the repeated half-lines in “Crosses,” as well as the inclusio device of repeating all or part of a line to open and close a stanza, which appears in several instances. As many individual poems have lines or phrases that recur, so the primary themes echo across this collection, in the continual quest for faith, hope, and love amid the prevalence of death, pain, and loss.
If the prospect of the poetry alone hasn’t been sufficiently enticing, it’s also worth noting that the physical book is an object of considerable beauty—available in a fine hardcover edition, with striking cover art and lovely interior illustrations by the accomplished British artist Michael Cook. This collection is a delight to hold and read, and the publisher, Wiseblood Books, is an admirable independent press delivering distinctive literature of spiritual significance and lasting value.
As all true wisdom must, these poems alternately challenge and console. The Locust Years rouses us to see the “deep down things,” unveiling the familiar and forgotten to help clarify our vision in the daily sweep and scramble, offering no easy answers but resounding with joy and hope. These are words to cherish and to sing, through the brightness of day and the shadow of night:
I woke, and all the kingless world was bleak.
I slept, and earth was governed by the meek.
I woke, and there was roaring from the south.
I slept, and children stopped the lion’s mouth.
I woke, and saw the locust eat the wheat.
I slept, and wept before the mercy seat.
I know I sojourn in the land of seem.
But which is real, my God? And which the dream?
Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, First Things, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.
Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, First Things, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.
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