Angelic Scintillations

While deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, ecological, and theological zeitgeist, Angelic Scintillations continues the poet’s spiritual evolution. First, the poet dialogues with her ancestor, seventeenth century Welsh mystic poet Henry Vaughan, the religious practices of his time and mine, using current events and politics to situate the reader. Second, she resacralizes cronehood and attitudes toward aging through humour and healing and using historical and autobiographical references. Third, she revisions the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, restoring their cosmic power via a feminist viewpoint. There is a cohesiveness here that melds a feminist perspecitve with questions about religion and Biblical stories—an attempt to situate all of this within a modern-day context with issues we face politically, geographically, and environmentally in today’s society. As it refers to contemporary and historic struggles for equality, respect and dignity, this collection chronicles the poet’s personalization of the divine experience into a more peaceful, harmonious way of being.

“In this remarkable book, Katerina Fretwell uses formal diction with a contemporary punch to match and challenge a famous ancestor, 17th century poet Henry Vaughan. Both seekers after spiritual peace in the face of emotional turbulence, both rebels in worlds torn by personal and political tragedy, there’s an eerie symmetry between their words. The resulting insights across four centuries offer a kind of grace and light that illuminate the terrible question of how to face the ravages of addiction, cruelty and grief with dignity and humanity. A book that underlines the essential relevance of poetry to our day.”
—Susan McMaster, editor of Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry

“Katerina Fretwell brilliantly conjoins the narrative of her life and lines with the life and lines of her distant relative Henry Vaughan. Interweaving their shared visionary imaginings, she carefully distinguishes fundamentalist ‘Christianisms’ from a more visionary Christology and Mary Magdalenenology (if there is no such word, there should be). Short free verse poems, like stepping stones among the longer ones that echo and honour Vaughan’s forms, plunge us into the morass of contemporary politics and culture. Yet the cycle does not leave us to languish there. The language of these glosas is dense, but accessible. The poet has stepped into the alembic of Vaughan’s alchemical transformations, expanding them from within to include the goddess and a non-dogmatic spirituality that Vaughan, were he living today, would fully approve.”
—Susan McCaslin, author of Demeter Goes Skydiving

“Hard-won and impeccably danced, this crazy patchwork pilgrim’s path is Fretwell’s Camino. Step with her out of drunkenness into holy madness and the deepest sanity of all. Don’t be surprised if you see William Blake and Kathleen Raine in the shadows, walking the same path.”
—Harold Rhenisch, author of The Spoken World

“Angelic Scintillations celebrates the mythopoeic in the present moment. Fretwell’s concerns embrace the planet, span centuries, but always return to a contemporary awareness, both political and personal. Throughout her scintillating text, Fretwell’s acknowledged mentors are ancestors who embody an extended poetic tribute to blood ties (from Henry Vaughan through to her immediate family), spirituality (Mary Magdalene) and ekphrastic dedications (to women artists as well as her own portrait homages). Fretwell’s word speaks the heart’s eloquence.”
—Penn Kemp, London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate & acclaimed performer/activist

“If as someone once said, ‘all writing is ancestor worship,’ the thus ensouled poems of Katerina Vaughan Fretwell’s Angelic Scintillations, engage the reader in the brave possibility of a revivified past whereby new poems honour old poems, and life, lived in a great continuum, also gives living breath to dead ink. The Shakers believed that when we give our entire attention to the work we do, the angels will come. If that is so, perhaps they fan their wings here.”
—John B. Lee, Poet Laureate of Norfolk and of the City of Brantford

“In poems ranging from a sequence of glosas on Vaughan to a sestina and taut, allusively-textured lyrics, Fretwell melds an exploration of religious/spiritual quests with an intense critique of contemporary consumerism, the manipulations of the media and gender imbalances that persist in the 21st century. Counterposing her struggles through addiction with her muses’ own travails, Fretwell’s poems compose a litany of musical beauty, a ‘melisma of notes’ becoming ‘one voice,’ her ‘tongue lauding/ the wildest flower, tiniest trilobite.’
—Catherine Owen, author of Frenzy

“We find the gospel of Mary Magdalene is not only an alternate rendering of Gnostic scripture which envelopes the reader in arcane mysticism, but these are soul tales woven within the tapestry of the documentary poem, a de-gendered or androgynous way of the cross wafting from eden to byzantium on hallowed wings, origami and absinthe laced.”
—Anne Burke, Feminist Caucus Chair, League of Canadian Poets