The Road to Emmaus

Two strangers walk toward Emmaus; Christ has just been crucified, and they are despondent-until a third man joins them and warms their hearts. It is only when they reach Emmaus and break bread that the pair realize they have been walking with Christ himself. The moment after they recognize him, he disappears. This is the tender story from the Gospel of Luke from which Spencer Reece has drawn the title of his mesmerizing collection-one that fearlessly confronts love and its loss, despair and its consolation, and faith in all of its various guises. Reece's central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a man who in mid-life decides to become a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems-in prose, free verse, and metered lines-follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In language whose simple, lyrical beauty gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small emotional moments: one friend confessing to another that he does not understand poetry; two lovers playing Scrabble; conversations on rotary phones between two men, each aching in a different way. In Luke it is written: "and as he was blessing them, he withdrew from them." The idea of love disappearing before our eyes haunts this speaker, the author, and this deeply, quietly, powerfully moving collection.