Yehoshua November
The Concealment of Endless Light
Orison Books
Reviewer: Vivian Wagner
Yehoshua November’s The Concealment of Endless Light is a beautiful and moving exploration of the wavering between hope and hopelessness in our lives. The collection’s poems examine how the profound and the mundane—the light and the sometimes seeming lack of light—are indelibly connected, and ultimately they work toward deconstructing these fragile and flawed dichotomies.
The collection’s first poem, “Notes on the Soul,” is set apart as a kind of preface to the collection, and it introduces the book’s deconstructive project. The soul in this poem is personified as someone who enters the body like a person entering a room who “cannot / remember why.” This forgetful soul is human-like, trying to succeed in its mission, but facing many of the difficulties that humans themselves do. The speaker expresses compassion for this flustered soul, as well as for the imperfect human it inhabits. The human body and the soul, though distinct, are shown as intertwined and entangled—the soul nested inside the body and each of them together “inside / the world.” The poem’s description of this fundamental human condition sets the stage for all the poems to follow.
A number of the poems in this collection explore teacher/student and parent/child relationships as analogous to the soul/body, divine/human, profound/mundane dichotomies, showing how all of these presumed binaries are based on inaccurate assumptions about both of their elements. The initial poem in the collection’s first section, “Teachers and Students,” for instance, looks at the ways teachers aren’t perfect, and can in fact sometimes be more damaging than helpful:
Strangely, often,
teachers’ most hurtful comments
are also untrue.
The speaker as father in this poem is similarly flawed, losing his temper “after one of my sons misread / a word in a Hebrew prayer,” and a teacher writes “Fascinating” in the margins of a student paper he hasn’t read. Throughout the poem, teachers and parents struggle to help their charges but ultimately and repetitively fail. At the same time, the poem nudges the reader toward compassion for all those involved, and it ends with the teacher in a remedial classroom trying again—and, we presume, again and again—with a sense of tentative but infinite hope: “In the semi-darkness, / seventeen faces gazed up at me.” The speaker wants us to see these moments of near-grace, since they’re perhaps the closest any humans can get to the divine.
The process of deconstructing dichotomies continues in the poem “Hearing Roy Orbison in a Mikvah in Salem, MA.” Sacredness and the everyday are one and the same in this poem, which uses Roy Orbison’s life and a Holiday Inn pool as lenses through which to glimpse an otherwise unknowable spiritual realm. Ultimately, the poem shows that human tragedy is simultaneously unpredictable and inevitable, and that there’s no way to understand why anything happens. Even Moses, when trying to talk with God, “heard only staticky silence.” There’s no easy answer here to the question of why we die, what happens when we do, and how to live in the face of pain and loss. There’s only mystery, and a hotel pool that provides a “makeshift mikvah” for those seeking solace in the midst of the unknown.
A poem in the collection’s second section, “I FELT LIKE I HAD WALKED THROUGH THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM IN AN EARLIER LIFE,” further explores the illusory dividing line between the sacred and the everyday. The speaker finds a print-out of an email from his grandfather—a “secular man, a former army aviation mechanic”—responding to the speaker’s spiritual doubts while studying at a yeshiva in Israel decades before. The grandfather seems not to address those concerns directly, but he does respond by referencing what he calls the Weather Channel’s “fatalistic reports about El Niño”: “WHAT DO WE UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE WIND?” It’s a brief, humorous moment, marked by a grandfather’s all-caps, and yet it raises a profound question about knowledge and faith. The speaker takes the grandfather’s question to heart, carries it into the poem, and delivers it directly to the reader—an unanswerable query that carries as much weight as any spiritual riddle.
“Morning Prayer and the Waste Management Co.” opens with a similar riddle from what the speaker identifies as “Chassidic discourse / I’d studied that morning”:
Did God withdraw
to make room for the universe
or merely carve out an open space
in His infinite light?
The speaker finds no way to answer this question except by watching a garbage pick-up happening just outside his window:
The men lifted the overstuffed cans
above their heads
and emptied the contents.
It’s a moment in which the seemingly highest of human concerns at once clashes and becomes one with what might be considered the lowest: trash collection. And yet, the speaker insists that we look carefully at this everyday work, not dismissing it but seeing the mystery and beauty it embodies. As the truck drives away, we hear that the sanitation workers “hung on to metal handles / and floated in the air.” The trash pick-up isn’t an easily-understandable answer to the riddle at the beginning of the poem, but it’s also perhaps the only possible answer—one that the speaker wants us to join him in pondering.
The collection’s final section contains one poem: “Notes on Marriage.” In this poem, marriage serves as a metaphor for the process of deconstructing tenuous dichotomies. Marriage is a way of understanding how humans might commune—as flawed beings in a profoundly imperfect world—with an unknowable divine. That communion, though, doesn’t happen in some rarified space above or outside of the physical world. Rather, it happens in everyday minutiae—packing lunchboxes, riding subways, grading papers, and raising children. As the speaker describes an answer given by mystics: “. . . we will see that the source of the body / is loftier than the source of the soul.” The last two stanzas of the poem revisit the speaker and his wife when they’re twenty and not yet married. They’re thinking in that long-ago moment about breaking up, but the wife-to-be gives her version of that mystic “we will see”: “We will have a good life together, / … You will see.”
This faith in the possibility of a “good life” despite all the inevitable pain, uncertainty, and tragedy underpins all the poems in this collection. Though there’s no knowing what will happen in a life, or why, these poems assure us there’s beauty and wonder to be seen in the smallest, most seemingly insignificant moments. The riddle of life and death can only be answered, these poems suggest, by looking closely and reverently at the everyday swirl of kitchen faucets and hardware stores, hand-me-down dresses and burials, trash collection and butterflies.
