Considering Fred Borsch’s career – culminating in more than a decade as the Episcopal Bishop of L.A. - his new book of poems, Parade (Los Angeles: Cathedral Center Press, 2010), has much in common with the work of his (and my) favorite clerical poet, George Herbert.  That is, a reader comes to recognize that a remarkable modesty characterizes the writer’s voice, a modesty in no way incompatible with keenest observation and subtle wit.  One should note first, though, that Fred has published more than twenty books, making him perhaps the most prolific ‘57 author. The range is impressive: theology, Biblical commentary, helpful counsel directed to the faithful, and quite recently an accomplished novel imagining what was in the minds and hearts of the crew whose assignment it was to destroy Hiroshima and frighten the world ever after.  The prose in all these books is strikingly lucid; more, Fred’s sense of the meanings of the lives of others – from the Son of Man to an Army Air Force bombardier – strikes this reader as notably empathic.  And now we discover that all along he has been writing poems.  Who knew?  But then one remembers that he was a Summa English major.  Yes, he has come a distance since, and from, his thesis on Virginia Woolf.

                                                                                                           

Parade testifies to the fullness of Fred’s experience.  There are handsomely turned poems here evoking faith, marriage, fathering and grandfathering, baseball, canoeing and camping in the North Woods, and places– see "Return to Tadousac,” a wittily bilingual Shakespearean sonnet evoking Bill Glassco’s summer house in Quebec, where a group of classmates gathered annually until Bill was taken from us.  The gathering in the next poem, the fully realized and, tonally, quite Herbertian "Reunion,” turns out to be of high school friends.  Even those who have made careers of writing and teaching poetry will learn something here about how subtly quatrains in varied trimeters and faint rhymes can be handled.  If one were to grumble about anything stylistic in this book it might be the rare syntactical inversions.  But then they lend the work something of the feel of a safer world, the one that, despite the Bomb, we grew up in.  As the book comes to a close a reader takes in the conclusion of "Going On,” a poem that starts with such broad strokes as "One day tricky Dick, and then old Frankie boy,” but concludes by not concluding – yet.

 

                                                            And the amazing thing

                        Is that any of us are still around;

                        I mean we all die . . .

 

Followed two lines on by this:

 

It’s because we are going one by one,

            or in little clumps that living seems not

            to notice or change that much, managing

            to go on, which is good, and somehow strange.

 

That exquisitely unemphatic mastery may reach its richest expression in the not entirely ironically titled "Free at Last,” which imagines the last "thoughts” of a hippopotamus in the Prague Zoo as the river waters rise during a major flood.  Simply quoting the terminal strophes makes the case for this book definitively.

 

            I was excited to think of trying

            out the Vlatava.  I might have

            escaped, too, floating as we do so well,

            and maybe found a bar downstream

            and ordered my own drink and things to chew,

            though who would know for sure what escape

            means for sister seal in a peopled world.

 

            The roar you heard was my laughter

            to see her slither off, and a rising hope,

            for I never saw the gun until

            your fear of me free, huge and strong,

            you said to be a kind of kindness

            to put me down.

 

The carefully ordered complexities of language and feeling here, to say nothing of the deft music of the antepenultimate line, signify a writer in full command of his art.  The ability move in no more than ten lines from the spirited humor of a hippo downing a couple in a Prague bar to its would-be-but-isn’t merciful death is reserved to those few writers whose humanity is matched by their talent.  I suggest that you buy this book and read it through on delivery.  You will not regret it.      Dave Sofield