Over the past half century Robert Rees has distinguished himself as a teacher, scholar, essayist, critic, social activist, and observant believer. Those familiar with his publications in the Huffington Post, Dialogue, Sunstone, and elsewhere will recognize in his poems the same moral purpose and confidence in right action that he expresses in his other endeavors. And once you have read his poems, it should not surprise you that they were written by a person who believes the creative process does not end with literature, music, and art but is also manifest in feeding malnourished children, defending LGBTQ rights, and testifying of the necessity of Christ in the world. The purpose is as important as the poem.
This may alarm those whose aesthetic is disciplined by the New Criticism and who insist a poem can be interpreted only in terms of itself, that no extraneous evidences of the unremarkable world may intrude, whether personification or pathetic fallacy. In the poetry of Robert Rees, there is deep empathy for those who suffer, but also rejoicing in the possibilities of the physical and metaphysical worlds, both of which are infused with signs and wonders. There is an intentionality in Rees’s poetry that informs even stones. And in this way, it may be more classical than modern, because whereas modern writers agree with Archibald MacLeish that “A poem should not mean/ But be,” the poetry of Bob Rees is a conversation about that being that leads—when it is most successful—to meanings deeper than the poems themselves as, to quote Auden, a poem “survives in the valley of its making.”
However, those who come to Rees’s poems expecting a didactic rehearsal of his social politics or his religious devotions (as expressed in his essays and scholarly essays) will be disappointed. Because there is very little of the political or even the practical in the subjects of his poems. Rather, there are the joys and challenges of family and community life; the conundrum of trying to comprehend suffering in the world; the faithful anticipation of a pilgrim continually in search of truth; and the joy abundantly evident in the natural world—all of which Rees sees as evidence of both the reality of God and the necessity of love.
Triangulating between mind, heart, and body and receiving the truth of each equally, these poems represent not only an aesthetic but a philosophy. In conversation Bob insists that the heart knows what the mind cannot and actually participates not only in feelings but in cognition and imagination. And that there are truths of the flesh that cannot be held in either mind or body.
But none of this is taught by Bob’s poems. This poetry is not instructional but inspirational, experiential; not a map to the light, but a refraction of light. Each poem is a separate color participating in the greater, unbroken brilliance recognized by a poet who feels, who believes, and who knows…as though revelation were a singular moment encompassing experience, and he were a stone through which the light refracts.
