Saturday Review: “Moving Bodies, Healing Places” a review by J.S. Absher
Joseph Bathanti. Light at the Seam (2022)
Joseph Mills. Bodies in Motion (2022)
We’re just a few weeks away from our next issue online.
Seven-time Applewhite finalist J.S. Absher reviews the latest poetry books from prolific Joseph Bathanti and Joseph Mills. Absher writes, “Reading these two books has reminded me how much enjoyment can be found in poems that engage the reader in conversation about the good life. Light at the Seam reveals a sacramental vision of life and nature, a hope in regenerative possibilities balanced against a fear of industrial exploitation and climate change. Bodies in Motion shows through dance how to live responsibly and joyfully through all the roles and stages of our life, from youth to old age.”
About Bathanti, a former NC poet laureate, Absher hones in on Light at the Seam‘s geography and spirituality: “In a topographic poem, the landscape mediates a sacramental relationship with the divine…. Bathanti’s sacramental vision is essential, based on the poet’s spiritual practice and habits of mind.” He cites many of the volume’s poems by title and mentions his favorite may be “Agnus Dei” about an old ewe sheared on Holy Saturday.
Mills’ “Bodies in Motion is a modern version of wisdom literature, an ancient genre that “rais[ed] questions of value and moral behavior, of the meaning of human life, and especially of the right conduct of life” but was not tied to a specific nationality or religion: it was above all pragmatic.” Absher states. The dances contained in this Press 53 publication number in the dozens, from well-known film characters and sequences to a quiet moment between a couple going round their home kitchen. “Bodies in Motion
is remarkably wise in its understanding of how to live well in our difficult, unbalanced times, of how
to submit to the disciplines of living while remaining able to find release and joy in spontaneity.”
Read the review before it is published this fall and buy the books from Bookshop.org or from your local independent bookstore.
