Review: The Multitude by Hannah Faith Notess

Reviewed by Maggie Trapp

The Multitude
Hannah Faith Notess
Southern Indiana Review Press, December 2015
76 pp., $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-930508330

In The Multitude, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, Hannah Faith Notess ranges from the personal to the spiritual. These poems are filled with recognizable longings—to find our place, to truly see others, and to ponder our role in all that we know or can intuit of the world. Notess muses on the large and the small, the revered as well as the bathetic.

These poems remind us that we each exist precariously between what we feel and what remains unknowable to us, between our own memories and our sense of the transcendent. “St. Augustine Enters the World’s Largest Pac-Man Maze” mixes the irreverent and the reverent in moving ways. Offering a seeming lighthearted mingling of sentimentality with thorny spiritual deliberations, the poem maps spiritual meditation onto the blinking byways of a retrograde video game. The poem’s speaker considers,

What is the soul, my God,
but a point of light
propelled by desire?

          ***

I seek you, my Creator,
yet pursued by heresies
and ghosts of heresies.

The poem tracks Pac-Man as he navigates his never-ending maze, which we are encouraged to liken to St. Augustine’s temptations during his spiritual journey. The poem is playful, wry, and almost offhand while it probes metaphysical questions. Notess often mixes high and low. In this way her poems surprise us with their wistfulness as well as their urgency.

This collection is often concerned with these sort of whimsical yet weighty reflections. Just as we’re urged to equate Pac-Man with St. Augustine, in “A Natural History” we witness the poem’s narrator grappling with her second-grade sense of how a theory of evolution might comport with a religious curriculum:

How boring evolution seemed; how long
its squiggly creatures took to surface
from brown pools onto the muddy bank,
while back at Christian school the brontosauri
galumphed through Eden, upending flocks
of peacocks and passenger pigeons, still sleepy-eyed
and newborn.

The poem has it both ways. It doesn’t come down, officious or stern, on either side of this ideological divide. Rather, the poem and its narrator understand the pull of both religion and science, each just as mysterious and compelling to a searching second grader.

The balancing act in “A Natural History” between the numinous and the sublunary is part of a through-line visible in this entire collection. Notess explores the many facets of faith and the self. She writes in various registers about how spirituality merges with nostalgia, how transcendence colors irony, and how dogma intersects with human frailty and emotional connection.

These poems’ narrator notices others and attempts to make meaning out of her discrete life lived amidst others’ lives. In the collection’s title poem, “The Multitude,” Notess gives us startling intimacy and wonder. This poem bespeaks the holding on as well as the letting go found in many of the poems in this collection:

                                                            You pray
for peace, pray they will go away and leave you in peace,
but they won’t. Listen, if Christ arrives to feed the multitude

inside you, it won’t be the kind of miracle you expect.
He’ll bring them a tray of stale biscuits and too-sweet tea,
a few bananas, hardly enough (you think) to keep them full.
Still, some of them may take and eat. Still, some
may gnaw the biscuits long enough to leave you a little silence, the kind
that makes you wonder what you were meant to hear.

In these lines Notess is not offering answers. She’s not even posing questions. Rather, this collection urges us to listen and to truly hear. In this way, Notess indicates, we may be surprised by what we learn.

Notess’ poems reveal the divinity in the everyday. Her lines parse a grammar of sanctity in a world where belief might mean a number of things at various times. In their particular scrutiny of the self, these poems celebrate the ways we are all part of something beyond ourselves.

Maggie Trapp teaches writing and literature classes for UC Berkeley Extension.