Completing my masters meant reading and writing and re-reading and re-writing VERY MANY POEMS, so for the past few months I’ve noticed that whether as a result of subconscious revolt or conscious angst, my brain has not been feeling so poetically inclined. Sadly, I felt that reading had become somewhat of an arduous task wherein I would become so anxious of missing something, that I would interrupt myself with reams of questions spilling out my nervous system. This happened to such an extent it didn’t really matter whether it was some indecipherable academic poets espousing their manifestos from ivory towers or ‘simple’ rhyming verse from anthologies of long gone youth- my brain would question EVERYTHING.
This succumbing to my own fear of my own stupidity (don’t you love constant existential dread!) has been assuaged for now, though. The book I am celebrating today really helped spur my rediscovery of the joy in poetry; those tingles and goose bumps that come when a line hits some tender spot of the soul just right. No complex theories to hold in mind as you try to navigate academic density or wrangle with experimental forms (not that I don’t love experimental poetry still, I do!!!). Epiphaneia by Richard Georges is a little book of bountiful spirit. The word Epiphaneia actually means the appearance of gods in the advent of help, and this book certainly does remind me of a guardian angel. It takes fundamental aspects of what makes us human – the ability to process the beauty of life, the reconciliation of complex emotions and frail, ephemeral bodies – and turns struggle and into hymnals of survival.
Epiphaneia focuses on the effects of the aftermath of Hurricane Irma (the most catastrophic storm to befall the British Virgin Islands when it hit in 2017) on the communities and environment left behind. These poems are not documents of utter destruction, though. Georges doesn’t shy away from the brutality of ruin wreaked upon his home, but his depiction of island life is anything but pitying or resentful. People and the lives they rebuild together for each other are elevated by a metaphysical capacity for love: a determination not to give into despair or forget the existence of beauty amongst the obliviousness of the natural world.
There is a simple grace to Georges poetry that enraptures and heals. His voice is of deep questioning, covering topics like death and hope and the possibility of connection, yet he does so with words so artfully arranged the complexities of life wash over you more like a ruffling breeze or slow tide than a morose tonne of bricks. His poems do not avoid sadness or pain, but they confront these undesirables as necessary moments of illumination. Beauty is painful precisely because it lets us see more clearly what we have lost; but that loss tempers hope which tempers life. And that constant cycle of death, renewal and growth is one Georges writes with a sagacity that belies his only short-life so far spinning on this little planet.
The collection reminded me a lot of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise in taking the mundane quotidian of people surviving in the aftermath of devastation and making it precious. I also love how Epiphaneia organizes poems by interspersing mini-mantras. The book begins ‘Arise, shine, for your light has come’. I’m not sure why, but this little element really made the book feel more personal, like it was really trying to push its voice out from the pages and speak. Whether these interspersions are the voice of Georges, or the Gods seemingly supporting and guiding him through the poems- I have no idea, and I don’t think it matters.
If you’re looking for a poetry book with soul and love at the centre of its purpose, look no further than Epiphaneia. It’s a constant reminder that this storm (whatever your storm may be) shall too come to pass.