Franciscan Notes

by Alan Williamson

The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet’s mother’s, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: “If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?” A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth.

The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, “skull / and beatific face,” with “the immortal recombinants of fire and water.”

Franciscan Notes carries us from the deaths of loved ones and the poet’s own approaching old age to the grounds of hope glimpsed at La Verna and Assisi, and from a pilgrimage to India and Japan. A wide gamut of human spiritual experience and a spot of the ecstatic, these poems form in deference to the great Rinzai Zen question, “If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?”