Gardening at the Mouth of Hell

the long version

<i>Gardening at the Mouth of Hell</i> is arranged in three families of poems. The first remembers people and places of childhood, the third is occupied with adult experiences, especially those of motherhood. The middle section extends another sort of family across time and space: Julian of Norwich, Héloïse, John Torrington (of the last Franklin expedition), Emily Dickinson, Terry Fox, and others. Bernadette Rule writes of deep connection, intimate and remote, inner and outer, private and public. Her poems are resonant with commonplace mysteries; ending, they never shut but generously tease a reader to dream them on and out. Here are quiet intensities, tendernesses tended by a gardener of the spirit who knows that spirit dwells in a body. The body as temple of the Holy Spirit is a conception that compels her. But nothing in <i>Gardening at the Mouth of Hell</i>is abstract. Everything, even the past, is here and now. You can see it, feel it, hear it. Once in a while you are invited to chuckle over it, and that might even be the surest mark of this book's wholeness.