rev. of Ladder of the World’s Joy by Sarah Appleton

"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in
Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the
ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's
The Phenomenon of Man, which she read during the nine-day period in which most of these poems were written, in an act of joy and energy. "I found myself engaged in the central work of humankind," she says, "a harmony between my deepest desire and the effort of the universe." This book is ordered like the Creation, beginning with such poems as "The Making of Adam":

The Light breathed the voice into him, the

     syllable cell —

parent/child with the first five-sided form.

In this first section, "Tree in the Garden (Counterbody)" expresses the experience of creaturehood, and empathises to the point of identification with the bodies of non-human creatures. In this section the poet also places "Three Watercolors by Elizabeth" and "Poem of Your Pleasures," about the innocent and primal creaturehood of her children, observed. After these comes "The Flute of Our Duration," in which the five senses are developed or discovered, each time as though for the first time, by the first creature. In "Sight," the poet sees her own pencil moving "in this mysterious dictation." This habit of giving credit elsewhere, this humility and sense of gratitude, is everywhere in these poems. They really
are a ladder, printed sideways on the page and running one into the next, so that as you turn the pages the sense of ascending is oddly present. This spirit of ascension carries the reader through the earthly, sub-rhythm of actual words to a higher (since it is a ladder) knowledge of creation. But this process starts with earth, the self, and with the senses:

There is the inner ladder and the one we put our feet

     on. The inner sight,

the inner sound, the inner touch,
the way

The organisation of the book into the creation preamble ("Movement into Plantlife") and then "seven periods" has a definitely medieval, scholastic or at least philosophic aspect. Her title echoes the 14th-century
Scala perfectionis (ladder of perfection) and the later
Scala Meditationis (ladder of meditation). In the poem "Sound," she says "this is the cloud of unknowing" (the title of a fourteenth-century religious treatise). The language throughout the book is repeatedly religious and Catholic: "the odor of sanctity"; "Passion. Eating and being eaten."; "the oil of God." But even without these exact references, the sacramental tone of the poems — the sense that each poem participates not only in nature but in supernature, that in each there is an upward thrust, Godward if you will, is overwhelming. There is nothing
contra naturam, but rather, an innocent embrace of the created order — love, birth, animals, trees, as steps on the ladder which leads ultimately to God.

In our age, poetry with mystical pretensions too often has foregone either the element of nature or that of supernature, resulting in a flat, blocked, obscure, overly personal or overly abstract voice. Sarah Appleton's voice is at once personal and concrete, philosophic and transcendent. In the seventh "period" of the book, the first poem is "Running across the sand with the box held out." This line contains the sort of elongated, epigrammatic, visionary moment that liesat the heart of artistic perception: a simple act or moment which somehow connotes something greater than, or beyond, itself, the visible pointing to the invisible. A child is carrying a box to us, running. "Kneel," she writes, "/. . . not in any name of
our time over that gift." And whatever is in that box, "shard, paper, bone, shell, catching whatever crooked sky glimpses — /we must take it in our palms/turn it, as the great wheel/under our eye, and speak the loving worl."