“Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost? . . . Leave this little echo to haunt the poem, do not give it form, but let it assume its own ghost-like shape. It has the shape of your own soul as you write.” — Barbara Guest, “Wounded Joy,” Forces of Imagination

When reading Laura Walker’s poetry, I am immediately drawn in by how it embodies the idea of this “little ghost,” an idea that Walker herself has mentioned in multiple interviews. In an exchange with Evan Karp for Litseen, Walker cites Guest’s way of thinking about this aspect of poetry as a key source of inspiration, saying, “I admire poetry that discovers a way as it goes; poetry that explores what language can be, do, enact, cage out, break; poetry that evokes, where something completely inarticulable hovers—Barbara Guest’s little ghost; poetry that rewards peripheral vision.” This influence can be seen in much of Walker’s writing. Through her frequent use of source texts, she deconstructs works that are foundational to our understanding of nature, language, and culture and reconstructs them in her own “peripheral vision,” creating visual, aural landscapes where “meaning” isn’t delivered directly, but rather, emerges only elliptically in the form of “questioning, exploring; things broken, fragmented lyrics, pieces of pieces, eddies, iterations…” 

Her approach to examining the edges of something, to exploring an aspect of a situation or an observation that might be seen as minor or even irrelevant, resonates for me because I am similarly intrigued by the potential of language, especially poetry, to haunt, to reveal truths subtly, to enact reality rather than attempt to explain it. In Bird Book (Shearsman, 2011), for example, Walker “borrows” and “departs from” entries from a field guide to North American birds, investigating gaps and divergences in shifting memory and narrative. She suggests

connections between the human and the natural world while also exploring the boundaries between them. Further, in an interview with Cassie Donish in THERMOS, she describes her use of a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (Vol. VI, Follow-Haswed) for her book Follow-Haswed (Apogee, 2012). As she began to read the volume, she noticed how the entries “seemed to speak to one another” in mysterious and unexpected ways: “I was fascinated by the fact that the smallest units of language are also terribly full, terribly laden. And that words are imprinted, just as they imprint us. . . . ” For Walker, the experience of reading the dictionary began to resemble that of reading any book, as any source will elicit differing responses from readers as we project our own experiences on to the page. This is, in part, what makes Walker’s work so compelling to me—it welcomes a range of associations and allows me to sink into the imagery and syntax rather than limit me to a particular interpretation of the text. As she puts it: There was something slippery at the core . . . and I’m always mesmerized by slipperiness.” 

Similarly, in her newest work, psalmbook (Apogee), she turns to another culturally significant text—the Book of Psalms from the King James Version of the Bible—as her source of inspiration and dialogue. Like she had done previously with the OED, she treats the Bible like any other text, never shying away from interrogating the relationship between reader and text but leaning into that slipperiness. Excavating the language, she responds to ideas, words, and phrases that have long been part of the fabric of our lives, in the process cultivating a conversation rich with natural elements alongside observations of human experience. While hints of the heavenly realm inevitably surface, this is a predominantly earthbound work in which the universality of the Psalms is grounded in the domestic, intimate realities of the text’s inhabitants.

While drawing from a mix of source texts and her own experiences, Walker’s preoccupation with hauntedness is ever-present in her poetry. Whispers of the past, echoes of memories—whether real or imagined childhoods or origins of the world—and shadows of other texts fill her work. In this book, she merges found and invented text, creating a tapestry of language that echoes that of the Psalms, in which several psalms recur in different iterations and everyday domestic objects—cups and plates, a pale blue chair, a washing machine, a broom—are juxtaposed with the celestial—a braided moon, a trumpet moon (though even these contain traces of the human)—and the earthly—fish, beasts, and many, many birds and trees. Thus “little ghosts” emerge in various ways throughout the text, which speaks to Walker’s ongoing concern in examining the notion of haunting, of being haunted. 

In “psalm 26,” the speaker states, “We all believe we live in the land of the living.” This wording places doubt in our minds—we merely believe we live in the land of the living—and calls into question our perception of reality, surfacing the possibility that we are ghosts living among the dead or maybe we are not even truly alive. And, what does it even mean to be alive? “Psalm 9” is more direct, discussing memorials left after the destruction of cities: “the buildings / are ghosts of themselves, the memorials / ghosts of memorials” and “lost figures are “ghosts / in the pitted air.” In a broader sense, these depictions of hauntedness coincide with Walker’s long-standing interest in the language of the Bible. “I’ve always been haunted by the pulling cadences of the King James Version of the Bible,” she explains in the THERMOS interview. For her, the tension she felt in finding the rhythms mesmerizing while growing up with a “proselytizing atheist” father led to a contradiction of “yearnings and hauntings” and to feeling “simultaneously included and excluded by that language.” This tension between being drawn to and intrinsically part of a religious tradition yet resistant to it for reasons within and outside oneself is relatable for many of us who grew up in a similar context, feeling compelled to participate in the community while not necessarily buying into all the values projected there. 

Because of this background, Walker seems quite comfortable inhabiting a realm of contradictions, as there are several instances in the text where a statement is quickly overturned by the next: 

i know that you know

that i am not a horse and yet

i am a horse, (“psalm 26”)

“i will not be consumed / i am consumed” (“psalm 27”)        

“a prisoner’s door / where there is no door” (“psalm 27,” alternative version)

Through these assertions and immediate retractions, she invites—almost dares—us to question what we are reading, cautioning against taking a seemingly straightforward statement at face value, much like how a critical reading of the Bible involves analyzing the text’s contradictions and openly navigating its range of interpretations.

Knowing that Walker’s father was a “proselytizing atheist” certainly informs my reading of a text written in response to, or “channeling,” as she puts it, the language of the Psalms. The depiction of the “father” in psalmbook can be interpreted as relating to her father, addressing the complexity and longing of their—or any—father-child relationship. At the same time, of course, the term “father” in this work can be read as a heavenly father. Thus the identity of a human father and the Biblical God figure merge and converge, with this doubling most apparent in this version of “psalm 2,” which is, perhaps, the most personal of the poems in the book:

if i hear him in the night                                                

and pretend i don’t, his rage                                                   

a vain and imagined thing

fatherhood

begins its complex yearnings:

what i can give you, what you

sitting lightly on the front porch steps

my father 

just a little

While the idea of fatherhood surfaces somewhat peripherally, this poem in particular carries significant emotional valence, even echoing the sense of “yearning” that Walker describes above which grew out of her response to her father’s atheist (or heretical, as it were) sensibilities. The original Psalm expresses amazement that societies and governments would reject God and suggests that there is no good reason why anyone would try to do so. Is Walker’s “psalm 2” response then a commentary, speaking of a figure, eg., the poet’s father, as a “heathen” raging against the teachings of the Bible?

Is this poem a haunting, a memory, or an imagining? 

As she notes, her father’s rejection of religion in an environment steeped in Christianity brought up complex feelings of being “profoundly and simultaneously both inside and outside the language,” as she could not enter the language of the Bible as a true believer but, eventually, she could as a writer/scholar/thinker. In an interview with Ben Niespodziany of Neon Pajamas, she explains: “I think I was mesmerized by what I heard . . . a voice, imperfect, isolated, needy and arching, both performing faith and faithful, with a desire to believe in something despite the impossibility of believing in something; so very conflicted, and so very human.”

“Psalm 2” appears (in some form) four times in the book—thus making it one of the more impactful of the psalms. However, it is not the only one that recurs throughout the text; thus “little ghosts” also emerge through frequent repetitions, ie., alternative variations of psalms. While Walker’s psalms often echo the ideas and the language of the original Psalms, in many cases, they disrupt them in unexpected and sometimes playful ways.

For example, variations of “psalm 84” also occur four times. 

The original Psalm reads: “Yea, the sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young . . . For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.” 

Psalmbook includes the following responses:

Instead of “For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand,” we get “a thousand cards lying on the floor.” 

Then later: “i will cut myself into a thousand pieces / and give you one — i will stand in your door / and ignore the tents —”

Later still: “i would trade a thousand days for you / i would stand in your door and look away from the tents”

And, finally, in the last poem of the book, the tents, the thousand days have disappeared from the page, but the sparrows and swallows have found a comfortable home: “birds flit in and out / and in / a blanket / a roof”

This series of responses exemplifies Walker’s technique of echoing moments throughout a text while adjusting the language in each instance, inviting us to pause and consider what is happening in these subtle shifts. The first response suggests a kind of playfulness, using imagery that evokes a card game; or, perhaps, it’s a house of cards, the speaker questioning the heightened notion that a single day in God’s presence is better than “a thousand days” elsewhere by calling to mind a structure that is unstable and likely to collapse at any moment. By contrast, “I will cut myself” is darker, suggesting self-harm as the speaker offers devotion through sacrificing a part of their mutilated body. The third seems somewhat in keeping with the original meaning, with the speaker expressing complete devotion. In the last, again in accordance with the ostensible meaning of the original text and Walker’s interest in birds, the meek and lowly swallows and sparrows find “a comfortable home.” Better to be lowly and doing “good” than living a life of privilege that is devoid of true meaning (or sacrifice). 

There are many other instances of wordplay throughout the text, illustrating Walker’s ability and willingness to interact with material in ways not commonly seen with a text often held in a high degree of reverence:

Original Psalm 100: “Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing. . . . we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” 

In response: “we used to sing, shaggy choirs”      

Original Psalm 150: “. . . praise him with stringed instruments and organs. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.”

In response: “internal organs and the rounding cymbals / high cymbals / far-sounding cymbals”  

The most curious instance, perhaps, is in “psalm 82”: The original Psalm proclaims, “Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” Walker responds, “i have told them they are gods. i have told them they are children, corn.” Due to the juxtaposition of the last two words, I cannot help but connect the passage to Stephen King’s story “Children of the Corn,” in which the children in a religious community in a small town have assumed control, killing all adults as a sacrifice to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” In the story, the character Burt discovers a King James Version of the Bible in the town church with pages of the New Testament torn out. The pages “made a dry whispering sound in the quiet—the sound that ghosts might make if there really were such things. Someone had decided to take on the job of amending Good King James with a pair of scissors.” Burt’s partner, Vicky, ends up crucified, sacrificed to appease the menacing figure who inhabits the cornfields. 

This is one of my favorite parts of psalmbook, with its callout to a very different kind of source text, which sent me down a rabbit hole reading King’s story and searching for connections like a detective piecing together a mystery upon uncovering a series of clues. Further, the references to cutting and sacrifice also echo some of Walker’s responses, including the variations of psalm 84, as discussed above.

Indeed, all three texts—the Book of Psalms, the short story, and this collection of poems—address the inevitability of human sacrifice, with both King’s and Walker’s works closely echoing the original Biblical text while incorporating the idea of ghosts as deep-seated and dark images that haunt their pages. The image of the cross—or at its elemental, a tree—is also present in all three texts. In the Bible, trees are often seen as Jesus-like and are referenced as a symbol of resilience and as a means to support life by providing shade, shelter, and food. But of course, they can also famously be used to kill and represent how low humanity can fall. In Walker’s hands, we get a layering of both meanings. 

Original Psalm 1: “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.” In response: “i am like a tree; you are / a tree; fleshy and drowned // the fruit flies between us.”

Unsurprisingly, given Walker’s interest in birds and the fact that songbirds are a fitting participant in a book of songs, the other image of nature that figures prominently in the text are birds. Sparrows, swallows, and other birds appear often in the Psalms; sparrows are considered a lowly bird that had little worth, but they are the bird that Jesus used to illustrate humans’ worth to God, showing God as a caring Father and provider.

In psalmbook, we encounter “sparrows a tumult” (“psalm 84”), sparrows and swallows nesting (84, alternative version), “a sparrow sworn against me” (102), and a “sparrow on a roof” (102, alternate version).

These instances are another example of Walker’s trademark technique of echoing ideas and images, of embracing hauntedness. In this case, beginning with a text she has long been exposed to but outside of, she homes in on “what hovers—glimpsed but never seen, unarticulated, unknown, unknowable—but still present. Palpable absence.” Here, as in her other work, she entreats us “to think of a poem as landscape or structure, as a place something else might briefly touch down in, or move through.” Yet, poetry in Walker’s hands is always something active and creates a sense “of movement, invitation, shifting inhabitances . . . an invitation to what can’t be written and what can’t be sustained.” 

In these pages, driven by her “haunted relationship” with the language of the Bible, she is “diving into that haunting,” giving us permission to experience this sacred text in “unknowable,” newly imagined ways.