Reaching for the Sun: Meditations

by Angela Herrera

In this remarkable collection of poetry and reflections, Rev. Angela Herrera provides a clear-eyed examination of life, robust in all of its glory and grit, from its most vibrant triumphs to its deepest anguish. Her fresh and honest take on the world will leave you inspired, heartbroken, breathless and optimistic.

Genres: Poetry, Spirituality

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Houyhnhnm · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's unfortunate that only the introduction is available in the preview. The autobiography with homily is interesting and provides some useful background info for the rest of the book, but it gives just the slightest hint of the power and magic that follows.

I am generally not a fan of the meditation genre. Usually the author reaches for elegance and eloquence in a quest to make Profound Statements. Every book of meditations I've seen (granted, not a lot) runs out of Profound Statements and gets repetitive. This author deals with this problem by turning meditations into poetry. Most obvious is the formatting of most pieces as free verse, and most of the rest should have been formatted as poems rather than essays. A number of poems are built around striking juxtapositions. Most impressive to me are the razor-sharp images. Again and again the perfectly chosen detail springs to life. For example, instead of “a city of dreary suburbs,” a city (presumably Albuquerque, N.M.) is described as “a city of gas stations and Minimarts.” After windstorms blow the siding off mobile homes in a trailer park, “the owners curse and,/smoking,/nail them back up.” That one sentence tells more about the place than 15 sentences of conventional prose could.

My inclination is to be drawn to the gritty details, but it's not all gritty and dark. For example, the description of the author's teenage daughter includes her lips, “still rosebud shaped,” which in context perfectly captures a last innocence. That particular image does appear in a very dark poem that heartbreakingly juxtaposes the daughter with a young victim of the Taliban. Another phrase I like tells of walking in the woods “under a rainfall of leaves/from the intricate ceiling.”

I find more wisdom in the seeing than the pronouncements. The poems that focus on totally abstract statements about God, Mystery, prayer, redemption, etc., don't work as well for me, but I'm very aware of how well crafted they are, so if you're into the highly abstract meditation genre you should like them.

I think the publisher goofed on on the title. “Reaching for the Sun,” the book, has little to say about plants or aspirations in the usual sense of the word. The phrase comes from a poem that starts with a description of worms and plants. It is the vegetables that are reaching for the sun, an unoriginal image that I would write off as a blunder by a lesser writer. In this case I'm willing to rationalize it; my guess is it's a trick to lull you into complacency before the knife slips in and the poem jerks to the subject of mortality. On a later reading you realize the mortality/death theme is nicely foreshadowed in the first stanza. Anyway, a much better book title would be the title of the preceding poem/essay, “A Laying-On of Words.” (It's another poem that's been manhandled into paragraphs.) It's a short short story with the explicit theme being the power of prayer. The phrase “a laying-on of words” points to a subtext: Whether or not they're in the form of an explicit prayer, words have power. The very best writing concentrates that power in breathtaking, memorable ways. That's the triumph of this book.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little book of meditations and prayers, this is a good resource for individual devotions for Unitarian Universalists, and of prayers for congregational committee meetings, house churches, and small congregations.