IN EARLY CHRISTIAN gnostic texts, you can read the story of St. Peter’s daughter, who would come to be known as Petronilla. Legend has it that Petronilla was so beautiful that her father prayed she be paralyzed on one side (so that she would not “be beguiled”). In Emily Stoddard’s debut collection of poetry, Divination with a Human Heart Attached, Petronilla is a fruitful companion and the voice of several poems. They appear alongside poems voiced by a contemporary speaker who we assume to be Stoddard herself. In this way, Petronilla serves as a sort of spiritual ancestor for Stoddard. Both look for and lose faith. Both find signs of divine presence everywhere.
While Petronilla’s God speaks in things like “fish and flower,” Stoddard’s confessional work finds God in interior, negative space — not in religious institutions: “I cut away from my body ... slice myself awake to numb arms ... too big to fit inside the church.” She tentatively hopes that “if it’s true, if god is there at all, she kicks us from the inside.” Faith finds form here in ovaries, dreams, the “dark joy” of Stoddard’s dying grandmother finding beauty in “the sunset on the highway.” Unlike Petronilla, whose father fears her seduction by men, the poet-speaker is seduced by poetry — the power of naming things “without the restraint of a scientist.” Names for plants, names for God: “we are not done yet / inventing names / for what will save us.”
Poetry can make the familiar strange, capturing timeless themes in language that lets us reencounter the thing made newly alien. Metaphors, like sacraments, turn one thing into another. Stoddard shines with some metaphorical transformations: “My god,” she writes, “is a long disappearing act, a Houdini with no trap door.” Eucharist “tastes like a stamp from a distant island”; a first marriage is “an unnamed seed that turns / tansy in me, turns nightshade.”
The collection reads, ultimately, as a promising but somewhat muddled first book. The poems, despite their metaphorical power and the compelling biblical and contemporary narrative, don’t always earn the metaphoric gestures the poet attempts. In the titular poem, Stoddard accounts for Adam and Eve’s restlessness in the garden: “Only because no animal can perfectly / avoid itself. Even ants will begin to groom themselves if given a mirror.” Does she mean that all creatures are vain? But what does vanity have to do with Adam and Eve’s so-called restlessness? Such lines scattered throughout the collection leave the reader not with a sense of mystery (which the best poems often impart) but merely guessing at the poet’s meaning.
It’s remarkably difficult to write a good poem. It’s even harder to use language to point at the unnameable, like God or grief or the historic silencing of women’s voices in the church. Stoddard succeeds in doing this when she lets the clearest details of her life speak to the spiritual lessons she can glean.
Laura Traverse lives in Syracuse, N.Y., where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. She also holds an MDiv from Yale.
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