By Ryan Masters
Two rivers converge in River Church: Selected Poems 1990-2025. The human and the holy flow together, coalesce into spooky, spiritually ambiguous currents, carry the reader past dark characters in strange and far-flung places: A man takes a bottle to the head and wears the cosmic scar like a supernova; A foolish preacher tries to convert nature herself; A poet gets stoned on kava in a South Pacific bar; A cross-country skier is erased by the avalanche he predicts.
Most of this book is a harrowing, whitewater plunge. It also contains startling eddies: Poems with deep, quiet passages that whirl slowly in the reader’s mind. For instance, a man spending time with his 102-year-old aunt considers how it may feel to recede into the past, to spend the last years of one’s life exploring gone-away places where “each memory is its own world, formed, and reformed every time we create it.”
Some of these more meditative poems touch upon the writer’s life. “Stealing Time” is a manifesto: “You must make the time to write—steal it from somewhere/from employers who believe they/own the minutes of your life.” In “Teachers,” Fielding compares the glorious coral reefs of the South Pacific to educators protecting their students, keeping “… the important spirit alive/beneath the surface…”
Love makes appearances in these quieter poems. In “With Kim, Clarksville, TN,” a one-night stand is a tender, intimate break from a painful relationship. In “Callia,” the electrifying conception and startling birth of a daughter forces a man to choose happiness.
But make no mistake. River Church’s more peaceful, contemplative poems are the exception. This book is a wild descent through 4 a.m. drunks, lovers’ fights, smoky bars, profound regret, ugly sex, money, violence, and unspeakable family dysfunction. From harsh tobacco-field lessons in Kentucky to interpersonal gulags in the Far North, to grim realities in a South Pacific bar, the twin rivers holy and human rage down River Church’s steep chutes and sharp rocks.
Hungry rats ignore Jesus to seek food in the same way that alcoholic fathers ignore salvation and die in hospital beds with bleeding livers and congested hearts. Americans detonate nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands and leave behind sad white men to ruin their daughters.
A finger fetishist breaks into morgues to cut off the index fingers of corpses and finds true love through amputation. Two daughters give away their toys when their whiskey-fueled father loses a hand of cards. And in the book’s darkest moments, a damned man takes his daughter to a rundown motel and forces her to watch him fuck a prostitute with “small skulls for breasts.”
River Church isn’t a place for the timid. The distant moon is the mouth of a well, you are at the bottom, and no rescue squad is coming. It’s a landscape populated by goddesses and hopelessly corrupt men. In “Becky Speaks of the Goat Woman,” vile brutes hiss, “Bitches, all of them, bitches./They all need to be fucked.”
Yet an abiding morality, albeit a brutal one, prevails. In the book’s final lines, these drunken men must reckon with The Goat Woman: “She butted the men to death./Impaled their guts on her horns./Spread the intestines/for the crows.”
Like Joseph Conrad, Fielding has conjured startling illuminations on the surface of a dark, dangerous river. The deft imagery, churning rhythms, and expansive palette in River Church belie the work of a mature poet operating at the height of his powers. Like a cold swim in mountain-fed waters, River Church is a shock to the system, a wake-up call, and, ultimately, a sublime surrender. Highly recommended.
RYAN MASTERS (RyanMasters831.com) is a writer, poet, musician, and bodysurfer from Santa Cruz, Calif. Jasper Billings photo.