Peter Clenott

“Let our scars fall in love,” Galway Kinnell said. In this compelling book, Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé moves his love language over old wounds, deep cuts now seemingly inappreciable. Scarred over and smoothed out—by grace. Yet, how reasoned and magnificent the rising for air, the lyric ascent that wraps a heady mix of theological imagination and handsome aesthetics, without pause or apology. This is a hearty nod to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s three transcendentals of Being—beauty, goodness, truth. In these poems, one experiences the full-bodied witness of Catholic piety, one that remains brave, vulnerable, curious, devoted, and above all, reverent. The lines traverse a broad, lustrous terrain, from Mount Olivet to Macau, Malacca to Montreal. From Caravaggio’s Deposition of Christ to Salvador Dalí’s Ascension of Christ. From the Church of Agios Lazaros to the Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary. One walks through Ordinary Time to Advent, and looks on the year Ash Wednesday fell on Saint Valentine’s Day. Without reservation, there remains an adoring love for the Holy Eucharist. And veneration for what is an impressive host of saints—from Saint Monica to Saint Rose of Lima, Saint John of the Cross to Saint Josemaría Escrivá. How do our conversations with God inhabit their own speech acts, then settle comfortably into the contemplative, the deep quiet of silence? How does the language of the confessional translate itself into confessional poetry, the expressed lyric turning itself over and over again, how iterative, how manifold the unfolding and infolding? A language always stationed in a state of contingency, open in its gentle evolutions—by turns; yet, all at once. The fragile transformations as delicate and faint, as they remain illumined, uplit. Always looking heavenward, toward the light, toward transcendence.