Exile’s Journey
By Jeffrey Bilbro.
Little Gidding Press, 2024.
Paperback, 64 pages, $11.
Reviewed by Sarah Reardon.
In my recent contemplations about literature, I have been struck by the mundanity and profundity that often simultaneously accompany the act of reading. In the midst of folding laundry, I listen to The Imitation of Christ and consider the necessity of humility. While taking care of the baby at night, I listen to Bleak House and consider some of the characters’ failures to love their families. During our recent local trips in the car, my husband and I make progress reading through The Aeneid and The Pilgrim’s Progress. As we drive, we wander with Aeneas on his way to Latium or with Christian on his way to the Celestial City.
In all these instances, the performing of some simple task collides with the pondering of some deep literary scene or theme. This is one of the beauties of literature: that it is an ordinary thing we encounter in ordinary life and yet it meanwhile directs us to extraordinary things.
I thought again of this collision of mundanity and profundity when reading Jeffrey Bilbro’s poetry collection, Exile’s Journey. One poem in particular—“Listening to the Iliad while Raking Leaves”—exemplifies this collision. The speaker in the poem listens to Homer through an iPod and likens himself to Homeric heroes in his work of “repetitive slaughter with hoe and rake.” For, as the last lines of the poem tell, in the simple task
of killing leaves and weeds we cultivate what great Achilles
never gained and what Odysseus regained only
after many years of toil, the goal that Thoreau knew
ought to be our being’s greatest task: to make it home.
The perils and wonders of the journey home pervade Bilbro’s entire collection, through a variety of verse forms and subjects, many of which are seemingly mundane, as in “Listening to the Iliad while Raking Leaves.” What Exile’s Journey imparts to its reader is a sense of the delights and duties of life as an “exile on the earth,” to use the language of the writer of Hebrews.
The book is split into three sections, each taking its title from a Wendell Berry poem which also provides the book’s epigraph—first “Scatterings of Sense,” then “Far from Home,” and finally “The Parts Rejoined.” The influence of Berry, as well as Thoreau, upon Bilbro is evident throughout the book. Some of Bilbro’s poems are formal, some more free-verse, but all of them are easily understandable, accessible even to those who don’t normally read poetry.
The poems in “Scatterings of Sense” have to do largely with words and artwork: several poems dwell on language and the aims of poetry, followed by a series of ekphrastic poems. These poems seem to concern the beginning of the exile’s journey—a journey toward beauty and wholeness. In “Verse,” the first poem of the section and collection, Bilbro uses the metaphor of a plough to show how poetry “cuts and churns…clods of dirt” until it “verge[s] toward the clarity glimpsed.” In another poem, “Poetry May Be,” Bilbro again uses metaphor to show what poetry is and is not; he concludes that a poem is like a prayer and that words “can only touch creation’s verge” but are capable of “straining to love divine.”
Bilbro’s poems throughout the entire collection both touch creation and strain towards the heavens. “Far From Home” consists largely of poems that explore change and the created world. The poems in this section have subjects such as migrating geese and cranes, the process of ice fishing, goldfinches seeking seed, the “mock frost” of dew that foreshadows winter, and the wonder of a growing unborn child. Taken as a whole, this section shows the patience needed for the exile’s journey. In “Ice Fishing,” Bilbro praises patience as a “delicate blossom / known only by waiting, watching,” just as luminous as the first fish finally caught. Likewise, in “Nunc Dimittis,” drawing on the character of Simeon, who waited to see the Christ child, the speaker wonders if he has “the patience needed to watch and wait / for the seed that ripens only in the fullness of time.”
In the book’s final section, “The Parts Rejoined,” the exile begins to grasp more fully the “clarity glimpsed” in the former poems of the book. The subjects of this section range from trees to deer to tools, but all of the poems in “The Parts Rejoined” seem to have a tone of certainty or confidence not present in the other sections. “Listening to the Iliad while Raking Leaves” falls into this section. Our “greatest task,” Bilbro tells us, is to “make it home.” On a first reading, this seems to refer to the exile’s return: to return home is the aim of the exile’s life and journey. But I wonder, too, if this “greatest task” might also refer to homemaking, not simply homecoming: to make a place into a home. For part of the exile’s journey, as the short poem “Sunflower” pictures, is to “settle down in the margin” and bloom in a highway ditch. Part of the exile’s journey, as the final poem of the section and book, “Back and Forth,” considers, is to patiently plod out one’s calling here.
“Back and Forth” contends that “so much of life consists of lines / that double back upon themselves.” The speaker makes a litany of them: among others, a rag wiping a plate, a shovel clearing the driveway, lines of poetry turning across a page, lines of morning prayer pricking “threads of grace in the calloused soul.” Each day, week, and year, we “double back” through such mundane tasks that “clean the grime of entropy,” Bilbro writes. The poem closes with these lines:
Turn by turn we learn to keep,
Our lamps bright, our wicks trimmed,
Our ears alert for the footsteps of the bridegroom,
The one who makes all things new.
Through each back and forth, each mini-journey, we prepare ourselves for the final return, the true homecoming of the new creation. As I read and re-read “Back and Forth,” and then returned to previous poems in the collection, my wonder deepened: does the exile ever arrive? Does the exile “make it home” in Bilbro’s collection, or does the exile merely learn to make a home here while waiting for the true end of his journey, which comes not from himself but from the arrival of the bridegroom, Christ?
I think Bilbro intends his reader to settle on the second. The journey of an “exile on the earth” is not completed by himself but by something—Someone—outside himself. At the same time, as the poems of Exile’s Journey paint, the exile may make progress toward his end through growing in patience and hope, through accepting the mundane moments and tasks of this life, whether fishing or raking leaves.
Sarah Reardon is a wife, mother, and former teacher. Her writing has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere.
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