Acts Poems

Following his memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark (2021), Reece's third poetry collection, his first in a decade, also takes its title from one of the books of the New Testament. An Episcopal priest, he devotes--in both senses of the word--much of Acts to his quixotic service in an Episcopal church in Spain. "Letters From Spain," an epistolary series of poems and the longest in the book, is deceptively prolix. What at first appears to be a chatty account of a religious and sexual life, of Spanish habits strange to a stranger's observant eyes, reads like a good novel, telling much by what is left out. When Reece returns to the States, he tends to his dying parents. Of his mother, victim of a stroke, he writes, "when there are no words, there are only acts." For Reece, the challenge is to write the words as lovingly as he is supposed to perform the acts the words describe, but which are wordless. The best poems in this collection enact this paradox, which is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.

The excellent latest from Reece (The Road to Emmaus) is immersed in a faithful, but not unquestioning, lyricism, in part inflected by his life as a priest ("Still singing in my cell," as he puts it). Having moved to Madrid, Reece suffuses the poems with Spain's music and poetry, with allusions to Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado running throughout. The country is itself one of the embodied figures of these poems: "Spain, you smell like cigarettes--/ generous, plump, never grumpy about sex." Neither is the collection "grumpy about sex," or love. It's a carnally charged tussle between "unidentified loneliness" and "he erotic barely contained." "Whatever the question the answer is love," Reece writes in the digressive, charmingly epistolary sequence "Letters from Spain." Righteousness and puritanism are the enemy in these pages, and a leavening wit seeks to amplify, and deepen, an erotic of piety. Lit up by memorable phrases ("above me Christ/ sags in his candelabra of surrender" and "the chandelier of Europe lit with empty churches"), Reece's spry musicality is amplified by his often plainspoken, pared-down syntax: "Longer I go fewer notes/ I need." These poems are generously companionable hymns of delight in service. (May)