The Dalai Lama, characterizing Westerners who move, as Captain Sir Richard Burton did a century ago, from religion to religion in a quest for spiritual comfort, has called them/us “spiritual tourists.” Burton moved from an arid Anglicanism, to Hinduism, to join an abstruse Moslem sect. The inheritors of his search have moved even farther afield. We are, a century after the advent of Darwin and more than a century after having embraced the scientific method, in the turmoil of a spiritual revolution, attempting to remake our understanding of religious and spiritual life. There is nothing we won’t investigate, taste, smell, eat, or listen to in our search.  

Adrie Kusserow in the poems of her starkly frank, frequently gritty first book confronts this situation like a boxer squaring off for a knockout. In the title poem, “Hunting Down the Monk” the nomads “wander from meaning station/to meaning station” looking for gods who “surface because/we feed them.” This interdependence of god and humanity is a recurrent motif. Although the first poems are situated in Nepal she covers most, if not all, religious bases unstintingly –Unitarian, Jehova’s Witness, Greek Orthodox, snake handling Christians and Buddhism, to name a few.  

As is true of all exceptional poets, Kusserow not only isolates a painful conundrum of her time but imbues it with the emotional ambiance that reverberates about it, developing a depth of field around her subjects. The searchers in her poems may sometimes look foolish, but their pain and need is made searingly real to us. They are in crisis. The misunderstandings between the seekers and those who appear to be comfortably ensconsed in their beliefs only intensify need and pain. The overwhelming desire to believe is a hunger, an anorexia, which she parallels hauntingly with the physical neediness of the East – hungry, desperate children, women unwittingly lured into the prostitution in order to help their families eat. But Kusserow’s universe is a difficult one full of questions, devoid of “cheap, creamy answers” even when what is being presented is “only God’s words,/the whole truth, no additives.” 

Having been trained in a number of schools which will not allow her to pass easily through the eye of faith’s needle, Kusserow is frustrated in her search. The Western disbelief in hierarchy, which as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, automatically destroys moral authority, is a natural outcome of democracy and withers the ability to believe. Her rigorous training in the scientific method, as a cultural anthropologist, naturally casts out other beliefs because its god is doubt. She is caught, “hanging like a bat in the walls of the bardo” between her childhood Christ, a rainbow of religions , and science. A subsidiary problem is that all of these religions issue from men and tend to deny the rich sensuality of life. That sensuality is apparent in her lustrous use of the language she refuses to abrogate. 

All of this, which could be a heavy, indeed, logy philosophical brew is rendered sharp, razor clean and clear as Himalayan air by her imagery and brilliant sense of words. She makes them crackle like morning frost on a tent at 16,000 feet. She creates not only her situations but her language new. The women of Kathmandu are “dressed like tropical drinks.” Kathmandu itself is a “Buddhist base camp” full of “nouveau monks – in their Ray-Bans, Nikes, burgundy hair.” Around all this she skulks like a dog to “sniff the borders/of other faiths.” She is well aware that she is close to being like a woman who “shifts from red to chameleon lime depending/on what branch of God she’s on.” Returning to Protestantism in her mother’s New England church she has a respite but no answer among “acres of elderly widows wearing gardens of pastels.” 

There is an umbilical cord for Kusserow between lack of belief and isolation, the desperate, if not despairing, loneliness with which all thinking Westerners are well acquainted. To not have a belief, a faith, is to be without community, to live your life as a singular entity, as a spider devoid of its web. Love and the sensual, birth and the relationship with both humans and nature provides the gifts of continuity and wholeness. Out of her sense of the sensual comes another sort of belief, a variety of pantheistic wonder that gives a spiritual connection with the world in her poems “Snowflake Bentley” about the man who first took photographs of snowflakes through a microscope. She describes how he sorted “snowflakes with a feather/holding his breath/to spare the life of each flake” sensing, as she does herself, 

the snow crunching 

as his center of gravity slowly shifted, 

making room 

for the joy of the infinite 

opening inside him. 

Kinship with both the human and natural world is what drives out isolation and creates community. We see this in Kusserow’s response to the birth of her child, about which she has created a lovely, long lyrical poem. The child’s newborn hunger echoes all the other hungers which have preceded her birth: 

Still nursing, but stormily now, legs kicking, 

Her free hand batting against my chest 

Like a small twig against a window. 

Perhaps it is the giving to hunger rather than hungering that eases the ache around the vacancy where belief used to be. 

Another replacement for Kusserow’s faith is to love not the belief created by men but an individual man. The old yearning still lingers, however, as when she writes of “the way stained glass/renews a stale God.” Through these various channels she arrives at an acceptance of death as an opening, which occurs when the body 

accepts what it fears: 

It moves from solid to liquid, 

It gives in and becomes the world. 

The final poems in the book give evolution a spiritual rather than physical meaning as they recognize that loneliness is as inseparably lashed to ego, as Ahab is lashed to Moby Dick’s flank, a decidedly Buddhist thought which brings us to the end with a flourish. The last two poems – Buddhist odes to her daughter telling her to let go of the mind –  

Hush, little one. 

Nothing I tell you 

Will ever measure up. 

Nothing else will coax the small fists 

Of your brain 

To open this wide. 

Suggest she has found a spiritual resting place of sorts in Buddhism and the mountains, ponds, and hills surrounding her Vermont home. She sees herself as growing into the world as Bentley in his snowflakes saw the infinite. Hunting Down the Monk is a volume of ripe thought from a vigorous mind, strikingly expressed in rich and vibrant language. Who could ask for more? 

Karen Swenson