Grief Melts Away

A Review of Kilby Austin's THIS WAY TO WARMTH

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring

—George Herbert, “The Flower”

In a recent post, Victoria Moul of Horace & Friends wrote about the value of the religious tradition, observing that the best contemporary poets today are religious “broadly speaking.” The poets themselves might not be religious, their work might not deal directly with religious themes, but they’re familiar enough with the canon, and their work is richer for it.

Poets who had some kind of religious formation have direct experience of this kind of depth of linguistic association, of what it means to hear the same significant texts repeatedly, to have them in your head.

The depth Mrs. Moul speaks of is the complexity and significancy that arises from situating oneself within the religious tradition. Any tradition really, but the religious one, being the foundation of all literature, has the most depth, having given rise to all others. There’s a term in Information Theory called Logical Depth, coined by Charles Bennett in the latter half of the 20th century, which I think offers a good explanation of the phenomenon.

Bennett was responding to the work of Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory. Shannon, in developing his ideas on information and how it could be sent across long distances on telephones lines, was interested in the transmission of a message and not its semantic content. Bennett, on the other hand, wanted to develop the idea of meaning within the field as a way of understanding what, if anything, made a message meaningful or interesting. What he came up with was Logical Depth, which is a measure of all the processes that go into making a message. Logical Depth equates depth with those processes which exist in the message as context, informing its meaning. To be able to understand any written text, for example, its language must be situated within the grammatical and linguistic structures that give rise to meaning. To be able to use words is to know, at some level, their etymology, the history of their usage. I’ve used this example elsewhere, but knowing that the word window was originally a Teutonic kenning of vindr (“wind”) and auga (“eye”), and that it meant something like “the wind’s eye” or “an eye of wind,” it’s possible to use the word in such a way that summons its original sense, giving it a sense of depth. An allusion to an earlier usage is essentially a signal of depth, however shallow.

Literary traditions summon a depth of linguistic association by alluding to religious traditions within which they’re situated. An awareness and familiarity with these texts, regardless of whether the poet is religious or secular, seems a prerequisite, then, for good poetry, whether their aim is to renew, restore, reject, transform, subvert the tradition. The more one understands how a message is situated within these hierarchies, linguistic, grammatical, literary, the more depth one’s writing can be said to have.

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It’s exactly this sort of familiarity that makes Kilby Austin’s debut collection, This Way to Warmth (2026, Prisca Publishing) so compelling. As she said in a recent interview, Mrs. Austin grew up practicing devotions once or twice a day with her family. Praying, reading scripture communally, singing hymns and psalters. She has thoroughly absorbed the religious canon, its text and its orality, and this sort of background lends her poetry, at the very least, a depth which is readily apparent and which rewards multiple readings. The significancy of her imagery, the rhetorical efficacy of her lines, and the music of her verse, are all rooted in a very old, very rich tradition, which she draws on to great effect. Its lineage includes George Herbert, Mary Sidney, Edward Taylor, Charles Wesley, and, most of all, Hopkins.

Compare the opening of Hopkins’ “Easter Communion”

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crookèd rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu’s

with the opening of Austin’s “Heart of Christ” which acts as a prologue to the book.

O heart of Christ to whom my own heart cleaves
but half-hearted, weak-willed, only weal-whiles;
O heart of Christ whom my own heart believes
but dull-hearted and in-turned; heart whose smiles
my ingrate heart forgets

The music in This Way to Warmth is as sumptuous and intricate, if not always as original or wild, as in the best of Hopkins. She likes the same words as Hopkins (“dappled,” “sweet”) and indulges in the same alliterative constructions (“weal-whiles,” “oyster-ache,” “brackish soul, sin-stirred,” “Pharoah-flesh”). Like Hopkins, her ear for syllable-sound and prosodic stress is impeccable, and allows her to achieve some remarkable lines like “Let Law lay by, low let waters pour” or these, from the opening of “Lunacy”

I grow weary as the moon that drags the tide.
I, tied
to weight inchoate,
gnawing need, deep
as the darkest deep,
ever frothing at the mouth
at the mouth of endless rivers

In her lyrics, too, one hears the music of the hymns she grew up singing. But never merely devotionals, they are meant to be read and not sung. Take “Apocalypse,” my favorite.¹

At twilight this evening
  it seemed that the world
in its turning and burning
  had been a great pearl.

Had we a great pearl
  of pain wrapped in beauty
where it curled and furled
  where it was conceived;

and were it conceived
  in an oyster-ache;
and retrieved or thieved
  when the seashells break;

when the sea shall break
  at its bounding shore,
the earth quake and shake
  to its simmering core,

to its shimmering core,
  at inscrutable meaning,
our pearl were the world
  at twilight this evening.

There’s something medieval about it. The internal rhyme in the third lines. The image of the pearl as the world, the way it views all creation in miniature. The repetition and variation of the last and first lines of the stanzas.

A major part of Austin’s style operates on this repetition and variation. Many of her poems feature refrains, or else repeat words that establish a rhythm or motif. In the sonnet “Sei Getreu” the word “steadfast” appears eight times in eight different ways. In “Passover,” “death” and its variations appear eighteen times. Here it borders on monotony, although the dullness is intentional. It is an ominous dullness, the same kind that must’ve occurred to the slaves of Egypt as they waited out the night. She uses polyptoton, the repetition of words derived from the same root (“die,” “dead,” “death,” as in Genesis 2:17, “Thou shalt die the death”) in “Passover,” and in these lines from “Black”: “When the accuser’s accurate finger / fingers the fatal faults that flower.” Repetition and variation.

Her rhythms and schemes, too, are varied. One never encounters the same tune twice, and the range of her musicality extends from her lyrics (the best being “Apocalypse,” “Fruiting Bodies,” “A Divine Lullaby,” “The Raven and the Dove,” and “The Wound”) to the prose rhythms of her free verse (see “For Heidi, Who Has Learned How to Fly” or “You Are the Salt of the Earth”).

She is also a perfectionist and self-professed grammar nerd. In the aforementioned interview, she goes into great detail about the significance of John’s description in Revelation of the placement of the Tree of Life. “On either side” and “in the middle of” the River of Life. The meaning of the Tree, she says, can be found in the choice of prepositions. Her insights into grammar, on Substack Notes and in my DMs scrutinizing my own poor placement of commas, demonstrates an attention to language at the level which is the real province of the poet. She takes seriously the smallest units of grammar and syntax which convey meaning however imperceptibly. It might be more apt to call her a precisionist than a perfectionist.

She is also primarily a devotional poet. She is tied, in my mind, with Kate Bluett for the title of best devotional poet on Substack. Though not nearly as prolific as Bluett, Austin makes up for it by the formal variety of her verse.

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All devotional verse is essentially an exercise in faith. It is an act of training the will to see what is often either invisible or absent from the world. In practice, it is willing oneself to see what is not there. Paradoxically, such an act of will requires a great deal of submission. Humility, as Eliot would say; the only wisdom we can ever hope to acquire.

To nonbelievers this might seem like an act of self-deception, the poet making stuff up to make themselves feel better. But if we look at the imagery in the best devotional verse, in Herbert and Hopkins, or in the psalters or books of prayer, we find that it tends to be grounded in the natural world. Metaphors of rivers and mountains, stars in the sky, budding flowers, trees from seeds. The desolation of winter, the return of spring. The devotional poet sees into these things the forces which govern their nature. Their notions of hope and grace, mercy and salvation, are no less a product of their observations of nature as those who observe that life is only suffering, only cruel and brutish, and then you die. What the devotional poet pursues, even in their lamentations, is the mystery of what is there but cannot be seen. In this way they train their faith through writing.

In “Signposts,” Austin’s flagship poem that lends its line to the collection’s title, we see this fundamental aspect in practice in the way the poet sees in the figure of a bare and bowed tree its opposite significance.

I felt the cutting chill
and thought how wintry months
had carved the tree with icy skill
and bent it towards the south.

A kind of signpost now
I thought it looked to be:
“This way to warmth and summer glow”
was written in the tree.

The cycle of the seasons are (forgive the pun) a perennial image in the Christian poetic tradition. It’s no accident that the major solemnities coincide with what were once pagan seasonal festivals. In the darkness of winter, the birth of Christ, and in the spring, his death. What the Christian sees is the opposite of what he sees: the way out of winter’s darkness, the end of spring in spring’s arrival. The opening of George Herbert’s “The Flower” is a great example:

         How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
         To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
                         Grief melts away
                         Like snow in May,
          As if there were no such thing. 

(See also Hopkins’ “Spring” which asks of the renewal it catalogues in the first stanza, “What is all this juice and all this joy?”)

You see this everywhere in Austin’s collection. In the image of “one old gnarly tree” that somehow points to summer. And in the image of the yellow gorse in “That Day in Lockdown” that exhales through its thorns a perfume that intimates to the poet what they themselves cannot articulate in the midst of suffering: “Grief may yet yield grace.” Austin makes explicit the dual image of the gorse’s thorns as both that punishment of Adam’s and its redemption through the thorn-crowned Christ. This coincidence of opposites, as McGilchrist calls it, is present in “The Raven and the Dove” which ends with the triumphant “where sin abounded, graces abounds the more.” It’s in the parable-sonnet “O Death, Where is Thy Sting” in the image of the bee’s sting and its honey. And in the poem “That He Should Come in Winter” when the poet declares triumphantly, “He should come to the very bottom // of our misery if he would raise us up at all.”

Devotional verse is the training of the will to see what is not there, but might be. Abundance out of dearth. Grace out of sin. Relief out of suffering. The exercise of writing is in finding the image and working out the argument, to glimpse the mystery and strengthen one’s faith. In Austin this practice takes the form, as it does in certain sects of Christianity, as a desire for suffering as a way of coming closer to God. She alludes to this quite often, but perhaps most explicitly at the close of “Peniel”

but in my weakness you were strong for me;
and only when I knew I couldn’t manage it,
I saw you face to face.

This desire for the salvation suffering brings often becomes a desire for suffering itself. In her most zealous poems, which become more frequent in the last section of the book, the distinction disappears altogether. Austin has said in a recent post promoting the book that one of its themes was “eschatological longing.” In the first section, “Meditations,” this longing takes the form of the personal and the natural. The poems generally have to do with nature, friends, or otherwise ordinary circumstances. The desire manifests as a psychological one, a longing for comfort in hard times, or for the renewal of spring, etc. The imagery is natural and grounded. In the second section, “Images from an Old World,” the imagery is historical. This section features longer, narrative poems that retell Biblical stories of great upheavals, from Adam’s ejection from the Garden to the Exodus from Egypt to the destruction of Jericho. In the third and final section, “Latter Days,” the desire becomes fixated on Christ’s suffering. We have several poems on the Passion that linger on images of the crucifixion and Christ’s wounds. The poet’s desire is not for worldly relief or historical resolution but for the End of Times, for the Second Coming signified by the blood of Christ. The language becomes the language of Revelation, mystic, apocalyptic. A longing not for relief but for reunification. In “Hoc Est Corpus Meum” Austin cries out

Oh, let your deadness hallow out the tomb in me,
rotting its living corpses clean away!
Exhume all other loves out of this earthen soul
and in the emptiness, oh, make me full.

Here the coincidence of opposites is taken to its eschatological extreme. In Christian theology there’s a concept called kenosis which refers to the “emptying-out” that Paul says Jesus experienced when he relinquished his divinity and became human. I don’t know if there’s an opposite or complimentary term that characterizes Austin’s desire to annihilate her human form and return to the Pleroma, but that would seem to characterize the longing here. It’s not a Buddhist emptiness; not an emptiness of the mind, but of the flesh, too. In “The Lord, the Lord” she calls it her glory to “drown and suffocate” in “skin and blood, in baptism, and in love.” The exuberance is overwhelming and masochistic, but that might be the point. One cannot anyway argue with the aesthetic force of the final line, when the image Austin has been shaping, of God’s glory revealed to Moses, culminates in her own desire to be destroyed by His immanence.

I will put on a naked body and die.

I’m not this Pentecostal, but I do admire the power of its rhetoric. It summons the ancient sense of awe, fear in equal proportion to wonder.

What I do not like about The Way to Warmth is the artifice surrounding the poetry. The overly long epigraphs, the Note to the Reader that wants to narrate the intended experience of each section. A precisionist is always in danger of becoming a contriver, always in danger of overfitting or overengineering what might otherwise work fine without all the scaffolding. She tells us in that same post promoting her book that there are “51 poems, in 3 sections of 17,” and that 51, 3, and 17 are all prime numbers, and that if you take away the prologue and epilogue you have 49, which is seven 7s, “seven being the Hebrew number of perfection.” As someone who grew up Seventh Day Adventist, and whose father used numerology to predict, unsuccessfully, the end of the world and the identity of the antichrist, I find this sort of stuff unconvincing.

But overall, I enjoyed This Way to Warmth. Austin is a fine poet. She’s technical but not overly so. Her lyrics and formal verse are softened by contemporary and folk tellings. Her free verse has a zealotry to it that’s aesthetically forceful. Her historical narratives are learnèd. Most of all, she does not wallow in grief (though she may indulge in suffering) but leads one through it somewhere that is strange and compelling.

1. “Fruiting Bodies” also ranks high for me, especially the final stanza.