In the Voice of a Minor Saint
By Sarah J. Sloat

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

Tilt Press, 2009
Stapled, 22 pages, $8

In the Voice of a Minor Saint, by Sarah J. Sloat, is a book that gripped me from start to finish, carrying me like a golden cloud of bees, from its opening auditory images to its excruciating mixture of “pain & ecstasy,” in poem after poem until I wore the final “Vestment” of bee stings.

In a way, it seems a violation to say anything about these poems at all, since they speak for themselves in the voice of a minor saint. They speak in various voices—quirky, tender, sly, and wise—and in various personas, but surely in the small and humble voice of a saint perhaps easy to overlook but, once seen and heard, not easy to forget.

“I came at a wee hour / into my miniature existence,” says the speaker of the title poem, evoking both saint-bound nun and Emily Dickinson, the smallest in her house, who took the smallest room. Like Emily, this saint is aware not only of her humbleness, but also of her worth: “I keep my hair close cropped / that my face might fit in lockets.” Oh, yes, she will be honored, celebrated, cherished; she will be immortal. Here is my favorite couplet of all: “My heart is small, like a love / of buttons or black pepper.”

This small-but-hugely-aware speaker is heard again in “Folk Art”:

Naïve, you called me, posh
and polished as a sampler
sewn with yarn.

And so not posh or polished at all:

It was my way to put things plain.
I stitched a heart upon my sleeve
at the elbow, where the cloth was worn.

Naïve and practical! Able to see herself clearly, and by way of comparison,

You were cut from finer stuff.
It’s not my fault
I was drawn wrong.

And humanly flawed enough to lay blame, maybe even to live in denial, until reality settles in:

Mine was a small world, small
and flawed. I could never hold you
with such short arms.

But folk art is real art, and goes to the heart of things. Attentive to small things, “with an ear for the specific,” the single-minded saint and multiple speakers of this fine chapbook share the heart of compassion, which spreads itself thick or thin everywhere in the world.

In the opening poem, “Opportunity,” the reader is invited to listen:

There was a sound like a moccasin dropping
in the upstairs apartment.

The word “moccasin” takes me not just upstairs but into a quiet forest and a culture other than my own.

And here is the “opportunity” almost missed, or completely missed if I stand looking in the mirror too long, getting ready, “making myself marvelous.” But the poem gets me ready to go out of any previous assumptions and into the book, attentively, expecting something marvelous. Among the marvels are such phrases as:

“Sweet little lack of crispness”—addressing the world on a hot, humid day (“Humidity”). And more hot weather: “Noon wounds me with its bees, its burning” (“Summer’s End”). And this:

The sun has come to steal my outline,
come to sort me,
stretch me along its javelin.

Social commentary: “I hate cell phones, attached / to their owners like idiot mittens” (“Shady”) and this, from somebody who’s made it to the top: “You’ll see / others like me, pumped / up, outrageous in altitude” (“High Heeled”). That last voice speaks in ironic contrast to the small voice of the saint, but might easily come from the throat of the same fully human being.

It’s no use pretending it doesn’t hurt, whatever it is, as Sloat points out in “The Problem with Everything.” This minor saint is a major talent who knows how to sew her heart, usefully, onto her worn sleeve. Read this book by Sarah J. Sloat. You’ll want to hear everything she has to say.

Visit Tilt Press on the web at http://www.tiltpress.com/index_files/Editors.htm

Kathleen Kirk is a poet and fiction writer whose work appears online and in print in Apparatus, After Hours, Greensboro Review, Poems & Plays, Quarter After Eight, Willow Review, and elsewhere. She has three poetry chapbooks—Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), Broken Sonnets (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and Living on the Earth, just out from Finishing Line in the New Women’s Voices series. She is a past editor and reviewer for RHINO. She writes about what people are reading at http://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/.

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