In reading some poetry collections one is immediately overwhelmed with the narrative and drawn in. Many such books are so intricate and complete in creating their own self-sustaining world that it is almost impossible to describe this microcosm to an outsider. George Franklin has written such a book and now I have taken on the daunting task of reviewing it with a great fear of not being able to do his work justice. The work is titled What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions and it is quite frankly remarkable in its scope, immediacy, and relevancy. The book is split into two sections, each which feature a supernatural being of mixed shade and brightness: the first being the Angel of Sorrow, the second the Saint of Unbelievers. Each is an otherworldly embodiment of the human condition. One seeks solace and peace through the torment and grief of our inevitable losses; one seeks a type of clarity and honesty in existence through the daily indignities and duplicities of survival. It is hard to not directly identify with each of these characters as most anyone who has suffered has searched for grace and most anyone who has held faith has questioned the value of belief. What is perhaps most endearing with both luminous beings is that they do not search for culturally accepted answers and easy comfort, but they see this human drama for all of its hypocrisy and moral ambiguity, for its terror and its humor.
The first section follows the path of the Angel of Sorrow, as he states:
The angel can change nothing.
He is not here to bless or comfort, to join a war or stop one.
If he hears cries, they are the same he heard at Béziers
And Jerusalem, Vicksburg and Stalingrad. A cloud moves
In front of the moon. It’s better that no one sees him.
The winged being appears during times of great suffering and doesn’t console the living, but is a presence, in the background, a silver fluttering, an unobtrusive witness and an unseen watcher and listener. He brings his empathy to humans without any faith that the pain will cease and no miracles to offer to stop any of life’s destructions. He envies the happy and the joyful who have forgotten grief at the moment, but knows what is in store from them:
Whatever happens, that they’ll remain
At the birthday party, at the house in the mountains,
Or climbing onto the bus. How they want
To hold on to that happiness, the air they drink
Thoughtlessly, unaware of the blue veins
Under the skin of their palms, fragility of bone
And tissue.
The Angel is aware that many of the injustices of humankind can be traced to its leaders who have reaped abundance at the cost of others, the irony that those in the same predicament would steal and kill their own kind for a worthless over-abundance:
police firing This, he says, is what you wanted to see, isn’t it? How it Really good violins actually—and the musicians The Angel does not seem to glean any epiphany from the cutting down of young lives and again does not offer any balm, all that he can say is: “Perhaps I have been changed by this place, my wings damp with these / sorrows.” At last he meets a philosopher and the man has found a way to find at least a sense of purpose, as Candide does in Voltaire’s work, by tending one’s garden: I am drawn to this house that So regardless of the “cruelty and stupidity” of the world, one still must get up, eat, function, feed, and teach and move through all of these rooms and all of these masks. Franklin’s conclusion here is hard-won and profound. The second section tells the adventures of the Saint of Unbelievers who is a type of honest and stoic man who seems quite out of step with the world he lives in, a type of Don Quixote or Chance from Being There. He lives an ascetic life in a small shelter in the mountains with a leaky roof making baskets and surviving on the donations of others. Many of situations he finds himself in are due to his unrelenting honesty and non-conformity with societal norms. As he confronts the president: Then, before the president could move on, he continued, “Now I have a question as well. How many wives, mistresses, and fat children do you have that you require such a large house?”
The saint was imprisoned for the next two months while the public prosecutor and the court decided what to do with him. Fortunately, the story of his conversation with the president circulated throughout the capital, and the opposition secured his release under the misconception that he was a political activist.
In another confrontation, this time with a captain, he is forcibly drafted into the army: When a certain captain grabbed him by the shoulder, the saint’s protest took the form of invective After a surreal battle in which the Saint miraculously survives, he is given a medal by a sergeant: the officer informed him he was now a hero of the In such interactions the Saint of the Unbelievers also does not believe that the objects and shows of vanity and pomp have any real worth. He believes that every man is as decrepit as himself and deserves no false elevation. One of the more comical adventures comes when the Pope has a vision of a Saint who is a recluse and sells baskets and he has some Vatican officials go and search out this “illuminated” man: He was not illuminated as he had been in They returned to Rome more confused than ever.
The Saint’s only real friend is the town librarian, and in one instance they argue about Pascal’s wager, and the Saint says: “It is even worse than you imagine. We all wager, as you say, on one purpose or another, on tending a farm or reading philosophy, on becoming a soldier, a priest, or an electrician, but regardless what we wager or how long we live, we never discover if we were right.”
Franklin goes on in the poem to describe the Saint’s thoughts: The baker’s wife hides In a fascinating description of the human identity as a grouping of random stories to either believe or not believe, the Saint explains: People are born And in one instance the Saint speaks directly to the sky, as if to God: “You want us to think you are an order encompassing everything, but you are It is the only temptation that matters.
In the end the librarian visits the Saint as he is dying, feeding him bits of food he largely could not eat and staying quiet, for he knew: The saint was pleased that the librarian didn’t feel the need to speak. If they’d spoken, the saint might have had to reassure the librarian that he didn’t fear what was happening to him. But they did not speak. They only drank tea and stared at the fire.
The breadth and weight of Franklin’s book cannot be underestimated. He brings many of the questions which haunt us throughout our lives—the meaning of suffering, the necessity for purpose, the unreliability of belief, the cruel and comical injustices of our laws and society—and he places them in a narrative of an Angel with heavy wings and a Saint who curses at politicians. This is a holy book for all of us who have been through our own valleys of death pleading with God without any satisfying solutions. He has brought emissaries from the heavens who we can relate to, as we prepare our basket to be sold, as we dry our wings in the morning sun. What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused, by George Franklin. Los Angeles, California: Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, June 2024. 62 pages. $14.00, paper. Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His tenth and eleventh books of poetry are forthcoming in late 2024: Sapphires on the Graves from Glass Lyre Press and 500 Hidden Teeth from Meat For Tea Press. More of his work can be found @ ferrypoetry.com. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Into the dark at any shape that seems human.
The angel looks over at me, knows I’ve stopped listening.
Seems to end each time, a capital where the rulers
Sprinkle cologne on their hands and listen to violins—
And philosophers die of tuberculosis, syphilis, or shame?
I’ve learned it does no good to argue with the angel.
needs to be painted, to rugs my mother took outside to clean,
the dust flying off in all directions, and to my books on these
shelves, some I know I’ll never open again …
… This is a life, such as it is, and I am satisfied with it.
accusing the captain’s mother of improprieties with bus drivers and mailmen.
Despite the mayor’s intervention, the saint, unconscious from a
beating, was carried back to the truck…
republic and pinned a silver medal on his chest.
The saint carefully unpinned the medal and examined it. Then, he threw it on the muddy floor
and walked outside.
Strangely, no one tried to stop him.
the dream, and he was cursing the shopkeeper for underestimating the value of his baskets.
The investigators immediately offered to pay for any supplies the man might need, but he
rejected their charity even more rudely than the shopkeeper’s negotiation.
the bruises on her face. The librarian tells him that the baker’s children have similar
bruises, and they never stop by anymore to turn the pages of a book. The saint knows that
pain is never symmetrical, and he refuses to pretend that the pieces fit together.
without a story. Images of themselves, of their animals and their parents, and anything else
that comes to mind, give them a story they can believe. But the longer they make such
images, the less they believe the stories they tell. Finally, they build museums, great
buildings filled with stories no one believes.
full of accidents, of falling stars, and the dust of planets destroyed by time. You are not
worth belief.”
Heavy Feather Review 