Dove Song: A Review

Just to declare my potential biases up-front: I received a copy of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother In Mormon Poetry in exchange for a review. Also, I know some of the contributors. 

In my last review of a book of Heavenly Mother poetry, I asked for more: more perspectives, more poems, more essays, more talk of Heavenly Mother in general. Well, ask and ye shall receive, as Peculiar Press has come out with an entire anthology of Heavenly Mother poetry, from the early origins of the Church to the present day.

Helpfully divided into sections by era—though missing any poems from the 1910s-1960s, when mentions of Her were apparently rare—the volume is more comprehensive than anything else I’ve seen. It includes poems with even a glancing mention of a mother-in-heaven doctrine, is a mix of previously published and unpublished works, and, best of all, includes poems in other languages, with translations. (I hope someday to see even more of this approach in Mormon anthologies, as we strive to be a less US-centric culture.) Not all of the poems are great literature, necessarily (no naming names here, Lula L. Greene Richards), but where they—and the collection as a whole—fail at poesy they still succeed as theology, or simply as history.

Poetry anthologies are designed to be dipped into, and returned to, and savored, but reading it straight through, as I did for this review, reveals some interesting patterns in the discourse over time: the mentions of Heavenly Mother in the early poems are so matter-of-fact and straightforward–of course there’s a female divine; of course she’s a queen in heaven–that they throw the lacuna of the early 20th century into stark relief: what was lost, as She disappeared, is even more than I thought. How had I never read Orson Whitney’s poems that so firmly declare “e’en as man’s, the woman’s future fate”?

That, of course, also lies behind the lamenting tone of the poetry from the 1970s and 1980s, as the authors, mostly women, wake to absence; in many of the poems of this era the driving images are of personalized, nurturing motherhood, a comforting feminine figure, rather than the queen and goddess envisioned in early Mormonism.  There’s something lost here too—motherhood surely can’t be the only image available to women in the hereafter, can it?—but, as a reader, I was more forgiving of this narrower view when I could see the pain of those missing years. Who can blame the denizens of a motherless house for fixating on the feelings of the orphaned child?

And finally, the contemporary years: as with the rest of the book, the quality here varies, but I appreciated the quantity, and the (increased) diversity. Relative to the late 20th century period, there are more men here—it’s not just women who would benefit from a female divine figure—and while much of the imagery is still focused on some of the physical aspects of earthly motherhood, the range broadens, and Heavenly Mother is seen in nature, in art, in science, in all kinds of creation beyond pregnancy and childbirth. (A highlight for me, in this vein, was Elisa Eastwood Pulido’s “Sightings: The Heavenly Mother in North Central Texas.”)

There will be something here for everyone, and I hope the book gets the attention it deserves. It’s an important contribution to our discourse, even if only to show that Heavenly Mother doesn’t just show up once in O My Father and then only among heretics and their subversive publications, and it provides an additional resources for anyone, scholars or otherwise, wishing to trace the notion of Heavenly Mother in Mormon literary culture. Finally, and most importantly, reading this volume could build comfort, for many Saints, with talking and thinking openly about Heavenly Mother, which is a critical next step towards a true flowering of our doctrine and discourse of the feminine divine. (Can we get this Deseret Books? Please?)