Books

The moon is on the move, faceless shadows pass in the hall, ghosts call from other rooms or stare with eyes turned stone. In his exile, the narrator stalks dark halls and chambers of his reimagined house.

Such are the lengths the narrator goes through to make sense of and outlive pain after surviving multiple pulmonary embolisms and constant back pain—he is an observer, the Great Outsider who looks in on the life from windows, from an armchair, or bed. The seasons grow and wane outside; the gossamer specters come and go from the portals of the Underworld with the changing light, and he is the soul fixed at the crossroads of life and death.

Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush captures the voices that fill our waking lives and help us master pain, weariness and depression. They are voices from the books sitting in the shelves in the office, voices of deceased relatives, of ghosts and shadows that keep us company through the lonely, yet transfiguring night.

Praise for Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush --

Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush is a lesson on how to meet a tempest. "I am a storm of air," the poet begins his story. There is a hush hush for all the sorrows. This book is an instruction manual on how to minimalize disasters while looking at what matters. The poet gives us safe passage through the needle's eye. We read the omens. We stand with him there on the veranda of life and death. 

—Diane Glancy

(Diane Glancy is the author of thirty-three books of poetry. Her latest book is "Island of the Innocent, a Consideration of the Book of Job." Her awards include a Pushcart Prize and others.)

These compelling poems wrestle with the self and the shadow in relation to the world around us. Michael Parker's large-hearted poems are unafraid to turn the mirror inward, exploring chronic pain, mortality, and grief. We discover a speaker in "a country of constant depressions" while we are reminded, importantly, to "wake up and become." The poems are divining the spirits, yes, but also God, Dante, Chagall, and some of life's big questions. This is an honest book of reckoning and wonder.

—Lee Herrick 

(Lee Herrick is the author of three books of poems, including Scar and Flower, and the co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit.)

Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush takes us with him on his profound journey through years of suffering caused by back pain and pulmonary embolisms. These poems, in Michael’s own voice, are honest, serious, and intelligent; they show a mind always working to mitigate and/or understand his body’s suffering, a mind seeking illumination in the stories of others, including Constantine, Xenophon and his hoplites, a Chagall painting, and Franz Wright. They are rich with language, metaphor, and original vision….These genuinely spiritual poems will affect readers profoundly in offering the full truth of mortality, the whole, broken story. All of us, in our personal journeys, can be healed by reading them. As Jane Hirshfield has said, “Fully rounded truth, seen without denial, will appear to us as beauty. By a poem’s held beauty, our held terrors become bearable.” 

—Susan Elizabeth Howe

(Susan Elizabeth Howe is Professor Emerita, BYU Department of English. Author of the poetry collections Salt and Stone Spirits.) 

In this metaphysical pilgrimage, Michael transcends his pain and questioning as he delves deep into his own consciousness and far into the expanse of the infinite to convene with spirits of both shadow and light. As you accept his offering, you too will find solace and enlightenment in the House of the Hush and Hush.

—Kolette Montague

(Kolette Montague was the 2000 UTSPS Poet of the Year for her winning collection, Easing Into Light. She is also the author of Chanting the Moon and Other Tales.)