Seeing Things/The Never-Ending Story/Covenant
Keen, Suzanne
tion is not subject to any moral censure. The anatomy of human love hangs on versa). For whatever it is worth, when hu- Which is, of course, the point of the reason's...
...Since all physical things mirror the awaiting selection for the transforming "lurking irrational shadow" of "radical an- divine, analogy knits the world together tihumanism...
...the New Haven Railway (Beacon...
...till it was my turn not to let him through...
...dowel and axe, the pain a punishgoldfinch over ploughland...
...To understand that we must turn worked gold frail to logic and the foundations of mathe- THE NEVER-ENDING STORY As the intact half of a hatched-out matics, which are concerned with rea- New Poems shell, sons, not causes...
...sibility...
...The col- They've swelled the barren woods, does not excuse him from the complicity loquial force of that "-almost " in a poem loading the unleaved trees like the of going along with what the writer has that also reaches to elegant description ("a black fruit chosen to represent: "Here one turns the leisurely collapsing of/the thing /into its pos- of nothingness...
...open From the rod stuck in one headrig Hudgins claims the lyric poet's most ven- long pause...
...There is no "idealism" in this ation of the playground scene, the boys' about the nature of man, society, and the manner of thinking, since the analogical fascination with Rich in his gold Sting Ray, world and through his choices of allusions imagination finds the ideal in earthly subtheir giggling "high-pitched ignorant/ un- and metaphors...
...Or string stretched perfectly To mark the outline of a house foundation...
...Finally, Hudgins's poems demonstrate ment for the dumb animal Andrew Hudgins's third book of poems, the vitality of metaphor as "a form of pray- persistence that so easily and thorThe Never-Ending, depends upon juxta- ing...
...the Brigid's Day the new life could be en- tom of each foot/a bee-stung lip pouts dain- wealthiest...
...Perhaps because the father's spade and takes up a different tool: ness about the demands of forms, and the volumes are considered only at the invi"Between my finger and my thumb/The human inability to live up to these expec- tation of the editor, Robert Von Hallberg, squat pen rests./I' ll dig with it...
...He isn't com- crowbar and boat hook, wind-borne gleanings/Or an unhindered ing back...
...Because 28: 26 February 1993 Commonweal...
...his poems sweepers who cleared the streets to make contrasts the plain, clear sentences that let based on paintings and images of the life way for Scipio's approaching army...
...Of course human marriage is root- ation of animal and hominid behavior...
...types of Catholicism, and the appearance goes along with a child molester...
...In blackbirds "fat and glossy as eight balls" the whole rich tapestry of custom"Compost: An Ode," the poet celebrates the eat up the world during Lent, "Building ary feeling, law, memory and homely ingredients of the compost heap and energy/for exodus...
...As if vidual poets missing from some of the other Past its own aim, out to an other side I'd stayed poetry series...
...Rather he seeks to time the continuity and commitment to indifollow the path of the flung pitchfork: for supplication...
...far, as yet unharmed...
...Now I had no name The most primary oppositions have Foreknowledge does not spare the speak- for what I was...
...wounds: "And on the pink, scrubbed bot- Or were these the masters...
...It surfaces in You also loved lines pegged out in 26: 26 February 1993 Commonweal the garden, The spade nicking the first straight edge along The tight white string...
...The more ing...
...2 + 2 = 4 has greater survival value than 2 + 2 = 5. But as one commentator points out, "We can explain why we should have acquired SEEING THINGS "The Biretta" in a sequence of similes: mathematical understanding...
...tion of his subject that is both chronolog- thority with extreme voluntarism...
...word for green...
...with the Ten Commandments, everyflowered by human choice replete with Fisher would have us believe that it is be- body else was busy worshiping a Golden moral lessons, legal sanctions, and, alas, cause animals act like humans (or vice Calf...
...it is the roots of marriage...
...Human individuals and societies may banded in silence...
...it comes line becomes the sign of the father's gefrom a hoard of objects discovered at nius: Broigher, County Derry...
...The poet does not hesitate from somehow, having gotten them this rope:" and ends with a flash of the gold reporting the effect of such envisioning...
...God who talks and hands out moral laws...
...SUZANNE KEEN is an assistant professor and artists in a community of culture that Because there are no intermediaries beof English at Yale University...
...It plays very Fisher lacks any theory of moral mean- dom, they thought better of animals than well on "The Donahue Show...
...The son inherits the father's skill with wryly, with qualifications, as his titles sug- Alan Shapiro's Covenant, also a third lines, reminding us of the frequently an- gest: "Praying Drunk...
...First fall, then winter...
...Elegy for My book, makes a remarkable addition to the thologized early poem, "Digging," in Father, Who Is Not Dead...
...ers," demonstrates the poet's attempt to A sequence of sequences makes up the Hudgins's debunking vision insists on recover the humanity of the anonymous second part of Seeing Things...
...mans first emerged from the animal kingwhole thing: no moral censure...
...When humans arrive in chapter 13, that...
...Where perfection-or nearness to up late and called the radio and Shapiro's unflinching poems range from it-is imagined asked the uncomfortable to the ecstatic to the exNot in the aiming but the opening they play a sentimental song...
...down some vast avenue, into the jammed intersection, at the "old My boyhood ended through an infinity of red lights guy, honking, honking," and "the tight knot there, that day, with nothing and not know any they were trying to untie/by tying tighter, else to take its place...
...into an interconnected whole and leads to This article appears, in a much-edited an acceptance of imperfect, corrupt human form, in Giles's massive new book on the nature...
...In "Two Ember Days in Alabama," oughly turned friend and relation, positions for its considerable energy...
...cy for gene persistence...
...Shapiro handles the recre- tained, through his implicit assumptions visible...
...And then to the rod erable traditional forms-prayer, psalm, the starting over...
...Giles offers a descrip- spiritual state, replacing obedience to auOrleans, Louisiana...
...In this vol- tations in "Praying Drunk": and not as the result of a contest judged ume, the poet does not snatch up his fa- I'm usually asleep by now the by different poets each year, this series has ther's dropped tools...
...He expresses his self-conscious- ries, Phoenix Poets...
...Does explain- Much of Fisher's book is a "good read" If anyone is puzzled about the populariing the root system of the rose explain the as one wanders through the stunning vari- ty of books like Fisher's, it is worth rerose...
...The line jerks and surges with the traffic and MOVE OVER, MATHER with the quick shifts in emotion-the speaker feels "good solace" when the old guy gets by...
...thread, connecting two souls in "an expansion,/ Like gold to airy thinness beat" that Suzanne Keen marks the poems most vividly...
...On the cover divides father and son-and stretches beof the book there is a gold boat, a marvel tween them-in "Markings," where the of survival as well as ancient craft...
...After- hide from the the world of playground within, but it suggests that motives and re- wards, the speaker reflects: games, "red light, green light" and from sponses are not only recoverable but plu- A boy is nowhere the adult world of the car: ral...
...What fascinated our ancient ancesquotes) into the biological background, the nical terms...
...but the ex- Seamus Heaney that small boat out of the Bronze Age planation does not tell what we have ac- Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $19, 107 pp...
...with which Heaney's poems are wrought: the poem concludes, "Most Christs re- their fingers blistering as they plied "imagine/ The limp rope fray and flare like turn./But this one's flesh...
...Acting as a warning as well as ifying of the poet's intervening voice...
...Barthelme's Catholicism stance, as in the mystery of transubstanease" at his questions, and the drama of was not a philosophical system, but a tiation...
...Either way we are Moses marks a radical turn toward the My rapid reader may think that it is mar- discussing practical options, not moral strangely human when he stumbles on a riage that will be explained but it turns out demands...
...been undermined, including innocence er from the assault of the old guy's hatred: The image of impossibility takes its ve- and guilt...
...their money, tered/By going through her girdle of straw tily...
...The two souls belong to father and son, not the lovers of Donne's "A Valediction, Forbidding Framed by translations from Mourning...
...The reader catches glimpses of the gold COVENANT vessel throughout this book of lyrics and Alan Shapiro sequences, but it is Donne's attenuated University of Chicago Press, $9.95, 90 pp...
...be stupid if they establish bad moral (ge- planetary inhabitants who could lie, cheat, Fisher appeals to sociobiology, a sci- netic) policies, but they could not be re- and deceive-as well as promise, decree, ence doomed to fail at its purported task...
...The Visitation," for instance, narrates else more boy-like To try to think it, in three stanzas the speaker's experience than in the way he say it, was to look of gridlock...
...The poem contemporary novelists Mary Gordon and opens with understated menace, balanced Robert Stone...
...last century argued that war was good ge- ever themselves...
...has formed a continual undercurrent to the tween the two realms, each individual is CARL L. BANKSTON III, whose poetry has dominant American ideology of Puritanism forced to take responsibility for his own appeared in Commonweal, lives in New and romanticism...
...cruciating...
...DENNIS O'BRIEN is president of the Uni- amination of the context itself by placing Mundane events can have only a figuraversity of Rochester...
...Wilson's praise: "...explanation of the netic policy (it cleansed the gene pool...
...Heaney's elegies relentlessly Virgil and Dante, Seamus embark upon mourning, investigate the Heaney's Seeing Things car- breach between the dead and the living, and ries the reader on a voyage negotiate the difficult return...
...The Puritan sepis The True and Only Heaven: Progress and cial context is expressed in the work of a aration of God from the world created two Its Critics (Norton...
...For a of Orestes Brownson as the first characlong time afterward/all I could think of/was Carl L. Bankston III teristically American Catholic writer, to the one time/he took me...
...And now they sim- page," Shapiro concludes, "and goes on sibilities") conveys the characteristic qual- ply leave...
...image...
...El guilt...
...The first stanza looks ahead imagines being a man...
...For whatever it is worth, when huWhich is, of course, the point of the reason's skeleton of morality and law...
...garded as evil...
...He is author of God and a variety of Catholic writers, filmmakers, tive and arbitrary relation to divine truth...
...Where the oars are needles and the quired...
...What exactly is supposed to be explained...
...And then the neverStuck in the other...
...So poem XXX of "Squar- reader hesitates and then recognizes the poet fills in the gap with conjectures: ings" begins in the matter-of-fact, "On St...
...here Heaney seeing things as they appear...
...on the ambiguous "took...
...Morality is good genetic pol- tors was that animals hunted, mated, and less one has to fuss about thought, choice, icy...
...REVIEWERS Catholic tradition in American literature By contrast, Giles argues, the dominant CHRISTOPHER LASCH teaches history at the and art...
...Despite the n an article in Commonweal in The concept of "analogy" is central to "claw-like" fingers, demonstrating the November 1991, Paul Giles de- Giles's interpretation of the Catholic sen"fuckyknuckle," a secret pitch, the man scribed Donald Barthelme as...
...The opening poem, "°The Sweephand...
...Fisher argues that peace is a better poli- of being...
...Animals were like gods, not like that one can slide human "value" (note they are certainly rational but only in tech- men...
...ode, lamentation, elegy-and deploys them ending...
...A rose is a rose is a rose...
...decay: "...In summer, the heap / burns like tray the observing eye by departing: The plenitude of the poet's imagination a stove...
...While he had previously cited American, Puritan mode of thought is University of Rochester...
...Sociobiology may explain the persistence of a practice but it cannot explain the inherent value in the practice...
...Andrew Hudgins Refined beyond dross into sheer Houghton Mifflin Company, $17.95, 67 pp...
...single author, Giles now turns to an ex- separate, closed realms of meaning...
...Requests...
...reading...
...In the Thomist doctrine of anain the car might seem to onlookers "a proud a fascinating example of the logica entis, the universe is represented father...
...His most recent book Bartheleme as an example of how a so- frequently "allegorical...
...to re-encounter the metaphors Heaney draws and crosses the line that and purposes of journeying...
...Unlike the gabby new and (worst of all) guilt...
...Embarrassed...
...There WHEN PERFECTION IS OPENHANDED is an obvious survival value to getting the right sums in mathematics...
...Yet like "The Sweepers," this Catholic literary sensibility at as a series of intercessionary links between poem is preoccupied with the difficulty of work," despite Barthelme's "avowed ag- heaven and earth, so that there are no unidentifying father, son, teacher, pupil, les- nosticism...
...Then this an invitation, "The Sweepers" cannot preCommonweal 26 February 1993: 27 pare the reader for all the subjects that lie "ride" with excruciating clarity...
...It can-almost-hurt you...
...the his word-hoard...
...Like gods, animals expressed the "fullness roots of human marriage" (italics added...
...U "making it my fault he had to lunge out/before me, that my brakes slammed, that I yelled back, asshole,/what' s the rush...
...The blackbirds attain lore the surprising heat they create as they their full symbolic freight when they be- into mere fill for gullies...
...By far the most harrowing of the poems in this volume, "The Lesson," reconstructs AMERICAN CATHOLIC ARTS AND FICTIONS ical and thematic...
...Social Darwinists of the and praise-animals were ever faithful, Consider the titillating fuzziness of E.O...
...The Liar's University of Chicago Press's excellent sewhich the poet listens to the sound of his Psalm...
...Or the imaginary line straight down A field of grazing, to be ploughed "Let me through, I'm a poet...
...He moves gradually the fascination, curiosity, envy, pride, Paul Giles from nineteenth-century American stereoshame, and memory of a young boy who Cambridge University Press, $65, 547 pp...
...The writer participated in a bridgeable chasms between spirit and son: "How would I ever say/ to anyone Catholic cultural tradition, Giles main- matter, between the visible and the inwho he was...
...Why membering that when Moses showed up ed in biology, but marriage is what has is the animal kingdom so fascinating...
...The us see the things that he sees, with visions of Christ best demonstrate this attention writer of the Roman history "doesn't say" discovered and launched in words from to detail, as in "Dead Christ," where the who they were or what they thought...
Vol. 120 • February 1993 • No. 4
