
What an Island Knows: Poems
Reviewed by James W. Hood
February 1, 2025
By Alexander Levering Kern. Shanti Arts Publishing, 2024. 148 pages. $18.95/paperback.
Alexander Levering Kern’s collection of poems, What an Island Knows, centers our attention on two interpenetrating landscapes: the interior one of the poet’s heart and mind, and the natural topography of Chebeague Island, where Kern and his family have summered off the coast of Maine for many years. Written over the course of nearly 20 years, these poems continually return to the island as they meditate on a full range of subjects: childhood; parenting; loss; nature; Quaker spirituality; family; and the problematic interstices of family history, which in Kern’s case includes the ownership of enslaved persons.
Friends will find much in these poems of beauty, delight, and challenge as the pieces intermingle what’s outside with what’s within, always keeping a steady focus on the Guide our Quaker tradition reminds us to follow. (Kern is a Quaker chaplain and educator, and serves as the founding executive director of the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue and Service at Northeastern University.) One example I find particularly compelling is “Summer of the Snapping Turtle,” a poem that moves from observation of a turtle appearing lost at the end of a road, to a deeper meditation on difficulties at work, to the poet’s son’s declaration that God “is a criminal of peace,” reminding us of God’s mysterious motions and that way will open even out of the most persistent conflicts. Spoiler alert: at the poem’s close, the turtle is delivered to a safe place “where the cool rivers run / without murmur or regret.”
The give and take of these poems often follows this trajectory, linking a natural world encounter with the poet’s taking internal stock. It’s unsurprising that such a dynamic inheres to vacation time in a startlingly beautiful locale, but such reflections here are recorded so adroitly and distinctively that a reader also settles into what Kern terms “the green habitations of the heart,” the quiet places where “the sower who sings in winter” resides. As the poems contour the particular challenges of their writer’s trials, we as readers trace in parallel our own travails, and we are thereby both chastened and comforted in knowing others have hiked on through the same ravines.
Friends will surely recognize the direct references to Quakerism’s spiritual tradition. The poems conjure stillness, peace, light, and guidance from beyond our own anxious seeking, asking us to settle into “knowledge far deeper than fact / sure as green moss beneath your feet.” They do not shirk responsibility for facing the difficulties of death and illness, but the poems provide a frame within which such challenges might be accepted with grace.
Poems here also accept responsibility for the author’s privileged position as an interloper on this land. As we learn in “Chebeague is an Abenaki Word,” the very name of the island where Kern and his family summer to relieve the stresses of first-world living comes from those Indigenous people who were dispossessed of it. There are also poems addressing the murky, contradictory byways of Kern’s family roots. In “Big Dipper after Midnight,” stargazing after supper reminds the poet that “these very stars looked down upon / your forebears’ plantations in tidewater Virginia / yet also looked toward the light in the barn / where your Ohio Quaker ancestors waited / for other bondsmen crossing over Jordan.”
Very occasionally I might find something here to quibble with—say, the repetition of the description “grapefruit sun” and “grapefruit moon” in two different poems—but I found myself greatly appreciating the lack of pretension and the directness of these poems. Far removed from the posturing pervasive in contemporary life, these reflections confront the substantive, human realities of day-to-day living. The challenges of working with other people, the difficulties of raising children, the fears accompanying our inexorable descent into older age—such are the persistent crossings borne in ordinary lives. I would rather have this companion guide to managing such things than a hundred Netflix heroes defeating some fanciful axis of evil.
And ever present in the poems is the island’s unwavering beauty, clearly a balm and remedy for life’s challenges, but also a sheer delight for its own sake. The poems render Chebeague’s birds, stars, trees, and tidal waters—their steady presence a baptismal salve—in language that heightens their fascinating presence for us. They become characters here, in the background, yes, but fully visible, like lilies of the field arrayed in glory.
Reading this wonderful collection, we learn to relish the mystery and paradox that, as Kern’s poem “Island Rescue” puts it, “day by day, we are perishing, / day by day, we’re being saved.” The island teaches all we need to know.
James W. Hood is a member of Friendship Meeting in Greensboro, N.C. He recently retired from a career teaching English and environmental studies courses at Guilford College.
Comments on Friendsjournal.org may be used in the Forum of the print magazine and may be edited for length and clarity.