The poems in Jennifer Atkinson’s Canticle of the Night Path, collected in alphabetical order from “Canticle of A” to “Canticle of Zed,” are little songs of five—five lines, five sentences, five couplets, or five paragraphs—canticles to, for, with, and of all sorts of things. There are Canticles to Chipped Plates, to Dust, with Eyelashes, with Macaroons, of Rhymes, Rushes, Slippage, Stone, Shrapnel and Manna. Woven throughout the book, along with a series of Parables as if excerpted from her teachings, is the legendary figure of Mary Magdalene, as painted by Giotto and re-imagined as a teacher of embodied spiritual and intellectual practice. Some canticles are lyric improvisations quick with rhyme, allusion, and wordplay. Others are meditative investigations of darkness, pleasure, cruelty, or joy. All are acts of fierce attention to language, the musical possibilities of the lyric line, and the natural world, built and unbuilt.
