Hours / Moon and Sun / A Hymn of Simon Peter

Hours. By Kenneth A. Lohf Jamaica, NY. Kelly-Winterton Press, 1996. 16 pp. $35.00 (paper). Moon and Sun. By Kenneth A. Lohf Jamaica, NY: Kelly-Winterton Press, 1997. 22 pp. $55.00 (cloth). A Hymn of Simon Peter. By Kenneth A. Lohf. New York, New York: Kelly-Winterton Press, 1998. 14 pp. $45.00 (cloth). These three slim vet nevertheless quite substantial volumes of verse by Anglican poet Kenneth A. Lohf present poetry that is as rich and exquisite as is the bookmaker's art practiced by Kelly-Winterton Press, surely one of America's finest creators of beautiful books. poems in Hours and Moon and Sun are subtle interweavings of landscape descriptions, theological meditations, and observations drawn from the poet's own life, both inner and outer. A Hymn of Simon Peter is a monologue spoken by Peter as he grapples with the mystery of the Transfiguration, and, more generally, with that strange confluence of uncertainty and knowledge he has concerning the full nature of Christ. All three of these volumes seem governed by the heavenly bodies that make up the title of one of them-the moon and the sunthe lesser and the greater lights of Genesis, which as Revelation tells us, will be needed no more in a New Jerusalem illumined by God's unveiled presence. But, until then, such bodies may well stand for, in this realm of time, those poles of imperfectly known worldly experience and a transcendent understanding of such experience which eve Peter found himself agonizingly caught between. Hours is made up of three poems which also mark off stages in the poet's own life. In Matins, a storm in the Hudson Highlands passes on reveal they mysterious beauty both of galaxies and of a moon that seems a beacon from the divine: in the darkness is the shimmer / in the silence the voice / in the loneliness the love. Such a beacon leaves the poet, in spite of early suffering and loss, still Watchful for the morning star. Lands takes us abroad Chateauneuf de Grasse and thus a later time in the morning of the poet's life. A village church's bells are echoing time's benedictions even as youthful passion has its way in these lovely Arcadian lines: Fragrance and color in terraces, lavender and oleander mimosa and cypress pierce the sight, ravish the smell and finally allure the mind their warm degree, seducing when the shepherd sings of his embraces in the olive grove, his sheep heedless feasting, their bells alive, alive on the heated arc of hours. And so, perhaps both in the ancient pastoral mode and in the Christian sense-sheep bells and church bells seeming blend as one-the poet now declares: I too eat the bread and drink the wine. Then, in Vespers, the older poet has returned the Hudson, but here the frozen winter river with its carapace of ice. Memories of time spent in the East-where an old man, reading his palm, foretells that the poet's fate will be to write / the memories of war and later, when the poet himself reaches the mature realization that on earth there is no continuing city-are counterpointed by a sacramental sunset: The trinity of fire, / orange red purple, / painting an epiphany in the west. in the end, the poet moves into a mature state of the soul memory is no longer the consolation and where, still living, he can Breathe the silver fire in the air and so prepare himself for death's midnight hours when I will inhale the gold--or, it might be said, where he moves, in his final spiritual illumination, from the moon toward the sun. Moon and Sun contains thirteen meditative lyrics through which the poet progresses from the first poem, Cape, in which he cannot escape, in spite of friendship and love, that tormenting night within myself' the last poem, an Easter poem, Sunday: For Saint Thomas Church, in which, during an organ-solo-like thunderstorm, the unconstrained love and mind of Christ embrace the poet and his moon-toward-sun intellectual and spiritual journey. …