Bower Lodge: Poems

by Paul J. Pastor

Bower Lodge journeys inward to a wild landscape of joy, grief, and transformation. By turns mournful, meditative, incantatory, and rejoicing, this poetry collection's fresh, potent images and unforgettable, musical language carves a map into that hidden, holy world that lies deep at the core of our own.

Genres: Poetry

117 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2022

Reviews

[Audrey Elledge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This debut poetry collection goes down like a whisky but nourishes like water. Earthy, haunting, visceral, and a potent reminder that the physical and spiritual cannot be untangled. So much is hidden in the metaphors, allegories, and imagery, but the main thread running through the book is an evergreen one: the idea that transformation and life come from breaking and death. The only reason I’m giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is because I’m reserving the latter for Paul J. Pastor’s (hopefully) next collection, which will inevitably build upon the strengths of this one and stun me to an even greater extent.

[Megan Willome · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bower Lodge: Poems Paul J. Pastor

My husband bought me this book for Mother's Day because he heard it mentioned on the podcast "The Holy Post." I didn't think I'd heard of Paul J. Pastor, but later I realized I'd heard one of his poems on a podcast I listen to, "The Daily Poem." The poems are paired with prints made from hand-cared lino blocks by Jacob Cowdin.

This was a collection that I fell more in love with as I got deeper into it, judging by which pages are dog-eared. It feels very masculine. It reminds me of someone, as if Pastor wrote a few dozen poems about someone he and I both know well.

Here's a found poem from "Bower Lodge." All the words are Paul J. Pastor's.

Nostalgia about the summer you become yourself.
Put your palm just here, son—

There is no reason why

stone that could not live until potential
had all been chucked away.

There is no reason why

so many gifts
they wither us

There is no reason why

in opposite directions, holding, together,
the arch

There is no reason why

give thanks, give thanks, give thanks;
This is the latitude of sloshing prayers,

– Megan Willome

[Matthew Wickman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bower Lodge is the kind of luminous collection you get when a poet of rare conceptual and rhetorical ingenuity as well as principled conviction also trains a studied eye on the natural world. Theology meets ecopoetics meets dry wit meets epic journey in this tour de force. Compulsively original in expression, endlessly generating new ideas from the objects of its attention. Pastor is the kind of poet whose vision could probably make anything interesting; happily, he attends in this collection to beautiful and important things. So worth the read, and re-read.

[Rachel]

I am not great at understanding poetry, but I heard a podcast where Matt Wickman highly recommended this collection and so I read it. There is a lot of nature imagery, only some of which I understood (being a terminally online person with lots of allergies). There were a lot of poems I didn't really "get". But the poems I did understand were delightful, like the poem about arch-enemies that makes a pun with "arch" and imagines them both holding up an arch from opposite sides. Or the poem about fishing lures caught in trees that strike fish as forbidden knowledge.

[Jonathan Puddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once beautiful, elusive, timely and timeless, Paul's words in Bower Lodge are like a shovel cutting into the soil and lifting it over to reveal both dark crawling things and new green life. More than once I had to catch my breath and sit for a spell. If you get this only for the entries Man-size and My Sons you will not have wasted time or money.

[Jake Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. A must read.

[T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

From J.C. Scharl's review:

Pastor has done the work of seeing. Tracery of other writers gleams out throughout the collection. In “Hold,” I hear W. S. Merwin’s voice in “This one’s a pen / that makes words disappear”; Franz Wright’s in “The Sea, The Tower” (“Do waves weep as they die on the shore / with laughter, with the wine-dark hymns?”). The anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight speaks in the closing stanza of “The Green Chapel”:


…for when I was one year younger and a day,
I held the heavy axe and brought it down,
And in the final moment as skin and sinew tore,
I heard a voice I knew:
Welcome friend. It’s only you you’re striking.

Seamus Heaney hides behind the bony clicks and kenning(s?) of “click crack / blood sap / joint back / man tree from a bone seed.” Derek Walcott might have liked “how it would feel / to hunt some younger god,” and Vladimir Nabokov would certainly appreciate the closing lines of that poem. Hopkins glories as “Ice of Eden / bobs in the glass-green brine pitching fits, / yawing yawned lessenings.” And of course, MacDonald is everywhere.

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