I am very proud and excited to be on the editorial board of Toad Hall Press, a small press that has just produced its first publication, Judah's Lion by Anne Caston. I will immodestly state here that not many small publishers are lucky enough to have such a stellar book as their first production. Dorianne Laux has called Judah's Lion "a pleasure to read, intelligent, moving, grappling as it does with reason and faith," and Lucille Clifton writes "[Caston] has dared to look without flinching and to report what she has seen. Her work is some of the bravest poetry written today. It is not always pretty, but it is always beautiful."
Anne Caston's previous book is Flying Out With The Wounded, which won the 1996 New York Press Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of an NEA Individual Artist Award, a 2002 Reader's Choice Award from Prairie Schooner, and 2003 International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. Currently she is core faculty in poetry at the Low Residency M.F.A. Program in Writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
At the center of Judah's Lion is Caston's son, who received a diagnosis of borderline autism as a small child. In this, the title poem, the speaker learns to see the world anew through his troubled, literal, and magical vision.
"Judah's Lion"
Irony is beyond a boy like mine. As is symbolism.
Allegory. Metaphor, too. All is literal with him
though that doesn't rule out a wildebeest,
the one he meets each morning in the fallow field
beyond our yard, the one who lies beside him
each night now in the dark.
Some morning the boy stands a long time, one hand
shading his eyes, looking sunward, scanning the wide
sky for that fiery wheel – Ezekiel's wheel – way up
in de middle ob de air. He says he'd like to see that
himself. Just once. If the sun would
get out of the way.
God has a lamb, he tells me one night after prayers,
who followed Jesus to school just like Mary's
lamb in the Mother Goose book.
And God? God, for him, is just one giant eye roaming to and fro
over the dark earth, peering through the windows at night
like some neighborhood peeping Tom.
To him, a fiery wheel is a wheel in flames, a lamb a lamb, an eye
an eye, and as of this morning's sermon, the Lion
of Judah – coming again, and the unholy
shall be judged and torn – is an orange cat that belongs to Judah
Michaels, a boy who lives two door down.
"I will kill that lion if he comes near," he mutters,
pocketing stones and pebbles as he walks all afternoon the gravel drive
between our house and Judah's, the young tom pouncing
bugs in the weed-riddled grass of the Michaels' front yard.
But now, the Sunday sun is almost spent and we settle
together on the splintered back stoop while shadows
creep forward from the field where his wildebeest waits.
While fireflies sputter on and off and crickets
call out across the twilit lawn, he is telling me now
about Zion, that beautiful city of God, which is
somewhere, he says, in Georgia, near Stone Mountain
except everything there – streets, people, trees – has gone
gold as Christmas glitter. God's people, he says,
are marching, marching upward to Zion, and he tilts
the stick he's holding to show me how steep is the climb.
He's going there too one day, he says, when he is big,
when he is old, when he must leave me. I stare at the darkening
field, considering again the lilies, the wildebeest I cannot see,
the whole thorn-torn mess a world can sometimes be.
Who wouldn't long for a Zion like his: the sky gone fiery, bright
overhead as Ezekiel's wheel, Gabriel singing us home
to Georgia again, this boy and me and his wildebeest,
all of us marching up, up God's glittering mountain
where the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah
lie down together and wait for us
there, somewhere, in the polished hard and shining future.
(You can buy Judah's Lion here)