Mining the Earth for Grace
The Poetry of W.E. Leathem

For fifteen years, W.E. Leathem operated in the fierce and cutthroat world of Missouri and national politics. Any reader, familiar with his political background, naturally would expect a convergence of the two major forces underlying his persona: politics and poetry. Would the poetry embrace his political leanings, would it match the intensity needed for survival in the political world. In Terra, Leathem's new book from Unholy Day Press, politics and literature do intersect but on an unexpected axis.

Leathem, after all, is given to saying that the sharpest politicians must concentrate their efforts, dedicate themselves to a few issues, a few themes. This is the lesson and the strength of Terra. Aptly titled, it is an ambitious work, keenly honed, that focuses on the earthiness of existence. Its voice is an elegy to the everyday world: the rigors it demands, the dangers it holds, the grace it offers those who will see.

In Gravitating, Terra's second poem, Leathem takes the reader directly into his earthy world; we follow eight-year-old drawn to a creek by the pull of toads and turtles,/rock damns and leaf armadas. Leathem, however, fills the poem with tension; the boy is in constant conflict with his parents, who forbid him from going to the creek after a distant cousin drowns there. The poem, though, is no nostalgic requiem; it mourns neither the dead cousin nor lost youth. It celebrates the sheer exultation available to those who live where and while they can. The boy rejects a safe existence in order to grab the rewards of living, and he knows full well that, Sure as green grass and wind and trees,/it's gonna kill ya. His deliberate decision then propels the poem to one of the most triumphant notes of this or any other poem: What's all this living for anyway?

Time and again, Leathem answers his question with a direct affirmation bound up in earthiness: the view from high up in a pine tree, a morning in bed with a lover, bare feet on grass, a hot bath. And, as with the creek, the epiphanic moment is never given away; it must be earned. Climb a tree, and you hazard a fall; love someone, and you can expect a loss; glory in the mundane, and you risk a life of quiet desperation; revel in a tub, and you must submit to the moon's sway and the echo of whale songs.

Recognizing the risk, however, is not enough. Finding the earthly epiphanic moment requires deliberate effort. Accordingly, Leathem's pacing is as deliberate as a character's search for earthly grace. He does not simply unravel a narrative story or relate facts; Leathem ground us in the totality of each moment. His control over the language keeps us from racing ahead for a payoff. He looks around and absorbs the weight of what is happening, so we can consider each moment's complexity, so we can appreciate its magnitude. At these moments, Leathem's poetry soars to meet the dignity of his theme.

In Gravitating, for example, Leathem spends four stanzas telling us of the cousin's drowning, and, although we presume the facts, we experience their enormity through his pacing:

will be going home,
home again to a mother crying -
going home,
only this time in a box.

Coming Clean is an entire poem that amplifies one simple action: the moment someone enters a bathtub. But it is never drawn out, never over long. We dwell in each moment of it, each opportunity to find the deliberate perspective and the entirety of meaning. As we slowly descend, we feel the weight of the world dissipate into a sublime moment:

So, down it is, at last,
down into tepid water, a filthy weight
lifting from shoulder, collecting -
a sheen, upon the surface -
head easing below the waves.

With his deliberate poetry Leathem expands and slows down the time of each moment, even when that moment seems disagreeable. In poems such as Easter, It Rains Again, A Phone Call to Nowhere, The Corner Table and Disappearing Act, in which there is a restiveness, even a dissatisfaction with the present moment, Leathem elongates time; he does not let the reader and characters move on until he is ready. Instead, we stay grounded long enough to re-evaluate the dissatisfaction, to understand that this is the only moment there is. There is no point looking forward to the next one, the better one. Live this one and mine the grace in it. At one such moment, in Killing Time, Leathem mines the last good afternoon -/not to be wasted indoors/watching cartoons, because he knows that they are all good afternoons, waiting for us to get out recognize what the earth has to offer.