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Bells in the Night spans the seasons from January to December and distances from New England to the Blue Ridge Mountains and Outer Banks of North Carolina. In the words of Randolph Shaffner, who wrote the Foreword for the book, Richard Betz writes about our mortality and the frailty of life - Life sings through our veins and unbalances us. Yet it’s this very frailty that attracts him to each precious moment to be savored before it’s gone, pinching up every crumb of day with the taste of the purely physical on the tip of my tongue. It’s what the Japanese call Ichi-go ichi-e (treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment). In his companion poems Stonework and Building Walls he laments with nostalgia the loss that comes with the passage of time. Work that endures yields to hard work and little to show for it. The same holds for words, which skitter and slip like living things, like the dappled sunlight under these trees that shift and change when the wind blows. What he used to think he was good at, he still strives to achieve: to enclose some small holy space, which he hopes to preserve in a poem. He writes of a rainy day at the beach with Il dolce far niente (the sweetness of nothing to do), of fishing as a glorious waste of time, hands filled to overflowing with blackberries, the day-darkness of blindness, sand dollars broken into change, and the high bright cerulean sky. His poems ring with the clink of cowbells, the clang of a hemlock branch on a metal roof, tick-tock crickets, the soft fall of a poplar petal into a cobweb, the rasping and screeching of iron on iron, the whispering water of fallen mountains, and the siren song of gravity. He paints what he sees and what he doesn’t, the visible and the invisible, beyond the margin of sight. His easel is filled with images of twig-legged shore birds, braids of foam, wind ripples of sand, pelicans stitching up waves, and the rumpled sea, of a black snake on a windowsill, the ghostly blue lights of condo windows jumping with televisions, and the vast emptiness of a January sky. His poems struggle with contradictions, as he confesses, I learned to live with paradox. In seeking passageways from one world to the next, from doubt to faith, he writes of birth and death, the squaring off of religion and philosophy, the shedding of our belongings, blindness as a dilemma for the theologian, and the bewildered Lazarus stumbling unbound amongst us. He finds inspiration for his poems in the Bible and Karl Barth, in the haiku, the poems of the Chinese Taoist Han-Shan, the plays of Shakespeare, Homer’s Odyssey, the poetry of the Polish-American Milosz, the songwriter Leonard Cohen, the artwork of the Japanese designer Ohara Koson, even the Japanese chef Masa Takayama, and Yogi Berra. He writes with a delicate gentleness when he describes his daughter at birth, having kissed the softest forehead my lips have known, and watched two eyes drift quizzically across mine. He writes with a merciless honesty when he describes the unkind, broken world of The Wrong Things and the raw, bitter, icy winter warmed only by candlelight at Christmas. He uses metaphor as a subtle tool of understanding, making it hard to tell where metaphor ends and rock begins. Yet all his poems strive for the glorious insomnia of complete wakefulness, a waking up to the glories of nature but also to the glory of an oncologist’s report that reduces a merciful day to such absolute joy.
