Book Review: Dreams of Passing Fire
Dreams of Passing Fire: Companion Poems from the Camino
by Katherine January and Rebecca Ring
Shanti Arts Publishing, 2024
114 pages
on Goodreads
Reviewed by Amy Horton | Warrenton, MO
The poets of this collaborative collection are writing-group friends who embarked on a Camino journey in September 2019. Walking approximately 200 miles on the Camino Francés, they didn’t then envision this book. They planned to return in 2020 to pick up where they had left off in Burgos and continue to Santiago de Compostela, but a global pandemic required them to change course. Instead, they set off on a different journey, retracing the steps of their 2019 Camino through poetry writing.
January and Ring approached their pilgrimage of poetry in the same way they’d walked together in Spain: beginning from a common starting point, or prompt, but allowing “each other the silence and separateness of our inner journeys” as they explored a town, an image, or an encounter through verse. In paired pieces, we hear each poet’s distinct voice based on how they perceived and processed a Camino moment experienced in tandem. As readers, we bring our own subjectivity to each poetry reading, adding yet another dimension to this “shared experience of seekers.”
One pair of poems nods to the impetus for their Caminos (divorce for one, retirement for the other). Another addresses the choices pilgrims make on what to carry and what emerges as essential. There are companion pieces on starting out before first light, what’s around the bend, finding our way, and letting go. One pair celebrates a masterfully concocted and seductive coffee drink enjoyed at an off-Camino café-bar. Another duo witnesses the unexpected ways we experience spirituality and human connectedness in the seemingly banal: pilgrim laundry.
The cadence of words repeated almost imperceptibly across many of the 30 pieces in this collection offers its own form of poetry: sunflowers, gold, olive grove, figs, vineyards, almonds, dust, boots, backpacks, light, fog, yellow, coffee, bread, wind, grapes, café, stone, clouds. These words set a journey scene familiar to most any pilgrim, simultaneously still life and moving picture.
In “A Dream of Passing Fire,” the near-titular poem of this collection, January writes of a dream she had on her first night on Camino. She and others pass clay pots filled with fire amongst each other. In dream analysis, fire can symbolize transformation and new beginnings, purification and cleansing, divine presence and vital energy. What January experienced in her slumber “wasn’t a relic of an ancient civilization.” Rather, it “was the way it feels to be alone—yet not be.” Her subconscious seems to have grasped that night what her pilgrim self would come to know—on Camino, through the pandemic, and into this gathering of companion pieces she and Ring created.
Editor’s note: Explore poems from this collection in this issue of La Concha—“A Dream of a Passing Fire” by Katherine January, and “Tandem” by Rebecca Ring.
Got a book or film to review? Let La Concha know!
Have you published a Camino- or pilgrimage-related book that La Concha has not yet reviewed? Did you produce a film on the subject that you want fellow pilgrims to know about? Drop an email to laconcha@americanpilgrims.org with the title and a brief synopsis of your creative work, and we will connect you with one of our reviewers for consideration.
