Review of Wonderwork at Mom Egg Review
Review by Sharon Tracey
From the Latin ministerium comes the word ministry: the service and work of providing assistance and care. And in her engaging new collection, Wonderwork, poet and Unitarian Universalist minister Sandra Fees invites us to bear witness to a spiritual journey as she questions and contemplates different ways of seeing, being, and ministering to inner and outer worlds. As she writes in “Inner Cosmology” (p 54): “I pick up sticks the winds tore down / in the aftermath of other people’s storms.” Work that calls her back “to what I once loved.” Herein lies the wonderwork.
Fees infuses her poems with bolts of color. She sets the stage with a Kandinsky painting that graces the book cover, “Painting with Green Center,” which brings to mind his groundbreaking treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. From “pink profligates” to a “blue-green warning,” from self-portrait as “flame” to “bioluminescence,” Fees strings poems and questions of purpose and meaning like colored beads, marked off one by one by the noticing. “In pursuit of the last cultivar” (p 59) Fees observes a plucked cluster of spiked mulberries and sees sacred relics. The purplish mulberry fruit also hints at the hue of the heart if one were to mix the venous and arterial.
Read the whole review here: https://merliterary.com/2024/12/15/wonderwork-by-sandra-fees/
