Judith Shadford's Reviews > Many Parishes

Hard, dense, sometimes frightening, Adrian's collection leaves me in awe of her ability and fearlessness. She's my friend--lucky me--and I had no idea of the depth of her experience because I have mostly seen her quick mind and hilarious sense of humor. Many Parishes opens another door. Rather like the music of Shostakovich, she reveals a world of pain and inhuman selfishness:
and she shrinks from the men who crawl along the back gates
to beckon: "Come on down, sweetheart, I got something
over here to show you,"
coupled with that off-the-wall sense of humor mingled with anguish in "A Nun Considers that the Righteous Hold Up the Corners of the Earth":
I used to scream at the
television set in the parlor, the sisters puzzled I should care
for the evening news but honoring me for my charming impotence.

Then they sent me back to bed, where I have been for a while.

All of which would be brilliant and dense and hard, except that through her parishes, many of them, there is the dangerous, vulnerable lightning of hope. Which also is like Shostakovich. The opening of "In Another Winter" begins:
We take this child we call belief, stand
it up against the darker children,
make it behave in rounder consonants,

as if there were soft ways
to see into the sky.

So there is the possibility of those soft ways...or at least the implication that there is such a thing as a soft way to see the sky.