"Toad Hall Press and a New Book by Anne Caston" (by Laura Orem)

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)

Comments

[Maria van Beuren]

Laura:

Your column made me read the poem anew, and tears came to my eyes.

Thank you, dearest. You are the best editor and a marvelous columnist!

The Toad herself (MvB)

[Grace Cavalieri]

Dear Laura, the posting of a single poem puts light around it in a way that somehow exceeds having one poem before it and one after. That you chose this poem is significant as it has all the elements of a masterwork, and hints of the magnitude of the book.

[Matthew Hinson]

Laura,

Can you let me know if Toad Hall Press is still in business?

I ordered a book on the website a few days ago and haven't heard anything back.

Thanks!
Matt