Romana Huk (USA)

Richard Berengarten: an editor's appreciation

For decades I've worked beside a broadside of Richard's poem 'Angels,' which I don't remember being given, but which has been up on my office wall for the duration of all my post-tenure years teaching and writing at the University of Notre Dame. Its blue words on their red backdrop voice a post-Holocaust consciousness and ecology, as the description of one of his collections puts it. Theirs is a consciousness of having long been hunted and repeatedly driven into new environments to survive only by nearly dying, plunging "deeper than terror" into metaphorical waters where they might escape their hunters, where lungs are forced to expand to stay alive. Like relations. Richard grounds his spirit-filled work so lovingly in human relations that angels take shape there, becoming in this poem what is not overcome by the darkness, what survives and even enlarges, laughs and feels joy with others as, "self-delighting in a borrowed world,"

              . . . we received as a rite

   water's gift, laughter, that drowns weeping

   and engulfs memory of all time but presence

   which, itself a flood, buoyed us up

   to sing across aeons, and our long calls

   spanned oceans' depths and embraced the other

   depths we embraced in and through one another,

   till our speech took on the pitch and resonance

   memory's currents had eroded in us

   wound round the endless whorls of the sea.

"Presence," one to another — one of Richard's greatest gifts as a friend and as a poet — is itself an overwhelming (etymologically-speaking) force, like laughter breaking into weeping. And one which paradoxically is both immediate in its effects and allows for speech "across aeons." And one which is perhaps related to the endless "whorls of the sea," which take the spiralling shape of the world's most fundamental natural design. This poem is remarkable for its folding of esoteric mystical and natural ways of thinking into healing interconnectedness, for it its hope that the circularities of unspeakable violence might finally be balanced ("singing of Tiphareth") by affirmation of the life-giving and far-reaching effects of the inclusivenesses of circularity: an ancient hope. I wish long life for Richard's long-calling work, and thank him for his inadvertent but much-valued accompaniment of my own spiritual thinking over all these years.

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