James Sale completes his Dantesque epic journey
Several years back, poet James Sale faced a life-threatening illness. Over the course of seven years, he wrote about it — in verse form. And his writing was not simply in verse form, but also patterned after Dante’s Divine Comedy. What Sale wrote was a kind of homage to Dante, to be sure, but it’s far more his own story and his own creation. He was inspired by the Italian poet, but Sale didn’t mimic him.
The first volume, tracking Dante’s Inferno, is HellWard. The second is StairWell (think Purgatorio). And now the trilogy of what Sales has collectively called The English Cantos is complete with DoorWay, which is how Sales has entitled what Dante called Paradiso.
Few people compose epic poetry these days. Fewer still would use Dante’s great poem as a guide for writing their own story. Sale’s creation goes well beyond both homage and autobiography. When you finish reading DoorWay, you know you are holding something important in your hands, something that transcends both. To describe the experience of reading it and its predecessors, you fall back on superlatives, but they seem inadequate.
Sale structures DoorWay as a journey across the heavens, using the signs of the zodiac as a formative device. The zodiac is a continuum, something of a circle that keeps repeating itself, but Sales must start somewhere. This is how DoorWay begins, in the zodiac’s eighth constellation, or Scorpio.
From DoorWay, Canto I: St. Dismas Speaks
A light breeze fanned the grass, and still a climb
Beckoned, though thought of it barely disturbed
My consciousness—me there, my soul, my mind.
What did all that mean? I longed for a word.
But in that quiet, ducks slept their long sleep
And nothing they dreamt of could be heard,
So shallow their pond, and yet … how so deep?
Forever there? But then a still small voice
Whispered in my ear: ‘Look up, Heaven’s Keep!’
I saw, then, the sign and my heart rejoiced:
The scorpion gleamed, its lowest star, its tail
And sting, sparkling mad in the cosmic vast:
And it too there as if held by a nail
Which, one of three, sustained all Heaven, Earth.
Indeed—and far below kept distant Hell.
James Sale
As we travel with him, we meet family, friends, and acquaintances, the well-known and the not-so-known, the people that the traveler comes to understand have been important in his life. They include his wife, “Awaiting with the patience of a saint / Doubtless.” The pilgrim comes to realize that he’s not simply on the best part of his journey that began with illness. Instead, this journey has a point, a purpose. He will come face to face with the Architect. And his journey will not end in death but in a return to a life that will now be lived very differently.
Sale has been writing poetry for more than 50 years. He’s also been a poetry publisher, a promoter of poets and poetry events, a judge in poetry competitions, a guest poet, a guest writer on poetry, and winner of numerous poetry competitions. His poems have been published in magazines and journals in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. He’s also co-authored three books on poetry for U.K. schools and is a member of the advisory board of the Society for Classical Poets. Sale also works as a business and organizational consultant and has published Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams.
You could read DoorWay on its own, of course, but you will find that reading it after HellWard and StairWell to be one of the enriching experiences you could have in reading poetry. Yes, superlative descriptions fail, but to read a work like the three volumes of The English Cantos is a stellar experience and simply marvelous.
Related:
James Sale and “Hellward”: Writing an Epic Poem in English
Poets and Poems: James Sale and “Stairwell”
Photo by Pacheco, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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