O Garden-Dweller
Winner of 2018 Catholic Press Association Book Award, 2nd Place in Poetry
This poetry collection reimagines the classic poetic text of the Song of Songs and considers its terrain of love and belonging in connection with how we seek out the divine today in our own backyards, literally and figuratively. The Song of Songs, found in Hebrew and Christian scripture, conveys in poetic form the intimate love between the bride and the groom, interpreted often in tradition as the human soul and the divine. The Song captures the spiritual journey of the soul toward its God through expression of the delight which the soul and the Beloved find in one another and their garden, the soul’s despair in the absence of the Beloved and the consequent experience of loss and pain, and finally the union of the soul and Beloved. This poetry chapbook is inspired by a garden and its residents, a historic drought, a wildfire and its aftermath, experience of the divine in the everyday, and the Song of Songs. Several of the poems echo moments found in the Song and other scripture, and the poems are generally arranged according to the arc of the Song.
Praise & Reviews
Laura Reece Hogan’s O Garden-Dweller is a twenty-first century Song of Songs–a lyrical invitation to seek the beloved among the “lilt of robin, / goldfinch warble” and the “medley / of sky and tree.” She carries us down the path to her desired destination with lovely alliteration and internal rhyme. The aptness of her word-choice delights again and again, and the subtlety of her images encourages us to dwell there.
–D.S. Martin, author of Conspiracy of Light, and editor of the Poiema Poetry Series
Laura Reece Hogan’s O Garden-Dweller takes its title from the Song of Songs, and explores the seasons of love: between man and woman, the soul and the divine. She traces the yearning toward God through the delight which the lovers find in each other and in their garden. The garden, a drought, a wildfire and its aftermath, the transcendent within the quotidian, all grow together organically to make this book work as a whole. In this garden, with its riot of apricots, mock orange, roses, morning glories, sugar maples, we feel the “sun-embered embrace,” see “the dew shine[s], / a needlework of mercy,” drink in rain after drought as “liquid mercy.” Hogan reminds us to “stop and inhale goodness,” and after reading these poems, we do, we do.
–Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and seven other books of poetry
Laura Reece Hogan fills her debut collection to the brim with a luscious joy you will love to taste. O Garden-Dweller is notable for its full-bodied exuberance, a reach and a grasp that exceed themselves. Her poems are spiritually erotic and perhaps erotically spiritual in a way that honors the Song of Songs–and yet they wear their very own “blood-red bloom of belonging.”
–Paul J. Willis, author of Getting to Gardisky Lake and three other collections of poetry, and professor of English at Westmont College