God Went to Beauty School

Cynthia Rylant
HarperTempest June 2003 0060094338 $14.99
64 pages 7-1/2 x 5-1/2 Ages 9-12 

Sometimes irreverence is the best path to understanding God as Cynthia Rylant proves with her twenty-three free verse poems that give readers a jolt in their thinking about the supreme deity.  Rylant’s writing has always shown her wondering nature and this book makes it clear that on-going questioning has led her to very personal relationship with God, a relationship she now shares with readers as she asks them to imagine with her.  
            What better way to imagine the unimaginable than to see God in the most human situations?  Rylant immediately disarms readers with the title poem, “God Went to Beauty School” that begins: “He went there to learn how to give a good perm.” God gets into nails because “He’d always loved hands- / hands were some of the best things He’d ever done.” God even opens His own shop “Nails by Jim”.  “He was afraid to call it /  ‘Nails by God’ “ because “people might /  Think He was being /  Disrespectful and using His own name in vain. And nobody would tip.”  
            The tone of this first poem continues throughout the book as Rylant glorifies God in human terms, allowing us to know His feelings in a way that explains much and makes Him real.  Rylant’s voice is lyrical and humorous as she pokes fun at human hypocrisy, seeing our ridiculous through sublime eyes and capturing the essence of God, His love of beauty and the way He sees the divine in everything.  Rylant writes with the confidence of a writer who has been lauded many times for her originality, creative spirit, and willingness to examine truths that others would not touch.  Her daring is as inspirational as her results.
            Part of the book’s success is due to her unpretentious style. It’s simple, spare, and as soulful as a good country song.  Each poem begins with implausibility and follows with a vignette so rooted in normality that by the end you believe in the poem and in the persona she creates. Sure, why wouldn’t God fall twenty times on roller blades, or accuse a doctor of being “pretty good / at playing me”? It makes sense that God gets a dog because He’d made that dog and “somehow He was responsible” and he’s also got somebody “keeping His feet warm at night.”   When Rylant gives us God in our own image, we understand how fear started the skip in God’s heart “when He first heard / that some people/ didn’t believe in Him”, or got into a fight in a bar when somebody said something bad about Jesus, or felt the “Light inside Him grow dimmer and dimmer” when he worked a desk job.
           The audience for this book?  Those who are mature enough to catch the gibes on society and clever references.  Those open enough to consider, wonder and make old beliefs new again.

-Susie Wilde

 

 

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