An extended review of a 2025 poetry collection by D.S. Martin
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The Role of the Moon
By D.S. Martin
Paraclete/Novalis, 2025. 128 pages. $30 (ebook $25)
This poetry, the fifth collection by Ontario poet, editor and teacher D.S. Martin, took me back to a moment in the English lecture hall at Western University. We were reading George Herbert, a poet of 17th-century England.
The speaker of Herbert’s poem “Easter” calls for his lute to praise the risen Lord, because the wood and strings of his instrument will be inspired by the wood of the cross and “His stretched sinews.”
It's a stunning metaphor: the strings of a wooden lute are compared to Jesus’ sinews, stretched upon the cross. It’s easy enough to understand, but also creative and arresting.
This is the creative spirit D.S. Martin sets out to channel in The Role of the Moon. The spirit of George Herbert, John Donne and their contemporaries who used elaborate and surprising comparisons to explore abstract ideas about God and Christian faith.
So, in Martin’s “Sargassum” for example, the speaker tells the Lord, “You’re like the colourful fish / swimming teasingly / within arm’s reach as we snorkel / yet completely untouchable.”
For me, the poem that opened up the whole collection was “Line & Colour,” with Martin’s characteristic spacing and lack of punctuation. It begins:
The first map you saw was
mere line & colour before
you knew to multiply it out into a world
before a blue curl could be a river
& a straight thread your street
It takes teaching and practice to look at “a blue curl” and understand that it means a real river. It takes practice to realize “three little squares” point to houses, and “three little trees / go further & suggest a whole forest.” The lines and symbols on a map are useful; they help us understand the world. But the map itself is only a reference, which points beyond itself into what is real and tangible.
What makes the poem remarkable is how it takes the next step. Just as a map points to the infinitely greater forest and wilderness, so too the world itself is pointing us to the infinitely greater mystery and wonder of heaven and earth, of the cosmos, of the kingdom of God: “we will be shown / how the landscape too in all its line & colour / reveals far more than itself.”
The poem invites us into this perspective on the “real” world, which helped me realize that the rest of the collection is doing the same thing. Through every image and metaphor, D.S. Martin helps us to see far more than what we see.
The Role of the Moon is an invitation to slow down, “to abide in in the knowledge / of the half or almost seen … the longing for what yet / has never been.” It is a celebration of the power of metaphor, so finely crafted by the 17th-century poets, but not original to them – for we have a metaphor-making Saviour.
Jesus constantly used images, analogies and parables to teach about the kingdom of heaven. In fact, He “did not say anything to the crowd without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34).
And when he spoke about Himself, only metaphors would do. For He is the true vine who invites us to abide in Him and bear much fruit. He is the light of the world, which the darkness has not overcome. He is the bread of life, which came down from heaven and gives life to the world.
Reading a whole collection of poems like this is not easy. It is a whole-body workout in metaphor – which is the metaphor I’m choosing to describe something that is difficult but good for you.
It was not always easy for the crowds who listened to Jesus either. But He came for more than simple understanding. He came to gather the hearts of men and women to Himself. And more than anything, metaphor challenges our hearts – our thinking, and feeling, and imaginative hearts.
Consider how Jesus, wisely, did not say “I am the one who is always near you and who looks after you comprehensively.” He said, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
Jesus knew how to captivate an audience – that is why “the crowd heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37). And if you pick up a copy of The Role of the Moon, I believe you’ll find gladness in these pages also.
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