Ashes/7 Years from Somewhere

...They tend to exagg- having veered back to a time of death- Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Cesar erate the drama of endurance and to make -wish, then beyond that to his birthplace Chavez are often mentioned, but if one cult of experience, of their griefs and now changed and strange, finally turns were to identify that with "liberalism" hardships, though their tone is generally away from praying for others to find one would miss the overwhelming sense stoical .and composed...

...dle age, much of it is directed toward the glimpse...

...History is nQplodding continuity of character, is often a void...

...Levine's high his own sense of charming endings...

...anced sense of Pope Paul VI, I find it American poets entering mid-life, and it And here, in "The Water's Chant," a impossible to imagine...

...Unfortu- from the world, sometimes an embittered Only a boy, still alone, nately, and for reasons I don't yet under- withdrawal, sometimes a brutal cutting still solemn, turning stand, the surfaces of much poetry these off by outside forces, a course redeemed in the darkness days seem as artificial and contrived as in rare moments by desperate joinings toward manhood, turning those of Augustan poetry...

...Alas, most conCommonweal: 568...

...written for the same audience...

...Thus have B-movies usually now...

...There is a touches Levine as it does Hugo, Stern, less sententious poem, where Levine, common array of heroes for most: Ignatow and others...

...helplessness...

...ders") in a tradition now cast aside by old able to guide himself on a universalistic Doubleday, $7.95, 186 pp...

...Only projects undertaken Levine's best poems are those in these, you have to keep your eye upon the absent-mindedly and without caring too which he finely calibrates the brooding doughnut, brother, and not upon the much, only material developed inciden- presence of past configurations-friends hole...

...we were good for, and we were church would be without the strong balThere is a sentimentality peculiar to good...

...And when his temporary poetry allow and perhaps that if poetry comes as naturally as leaves passion goes undisciplined, the poems' encourage poets to fabricate the look of to a tree-as Keats said it must-it will sentiments seem little more than an oblisincerity and deep feeling much as the be singular and exciting and new, how- gation to contemporary conventions or to rhyming couplet allowed eighteenth cen- ever wintry its theme...

...This kind of wish may strike some readers as overextended, gross, Romantic, but I think its intensity is redeemed by the A poet of rage purity of its origins in the felt life, in situation, character and event...

...When it is laid on, modern Spanish history...

...His subject, as in all as the years turned is that our own poetry pretends to the felt his books since They Feed They Lion in imperceptibly, petal life...

...If emotion occasions clear-minded, 1972, is his own history (situated mostly by petal, closing stylized expression, poetry should have in remembered factories and mills for the night, no need to boast its sincerity, its feeling- around Detroit and, later, in the red the question still ness...

...conscious delivery...

...tury writers to produce poems with the theme is the tragic detachment of self These are the closing lines of "Asking" look of dandified intelligence...

...These are not the something like "continuumists" since dida Lund points out in her essay, fiery, dramatic, climactic confessions of they all believe in the density of history, we seem to live in the Age of the Adverb...

...Hollywood that what it put its mind to, it and moving elegiac poetry...

...Here, for example, in "Each Time Is journalist, an historian, a theologian, a Because his poetry is for the most part Different": sociologist (maybe two...

...So from "the place within me/where I am masculine approach-insolent...

...Most of the writers importance, they become the most im- day...

...liberalisms...

...yesteryear, these are nostalgia for former tradition and particularity which pre"X is currently married to Y. Has he left excitements: conversion, early days at cludes the radical, sweeping, rational rethe priesthood yet...

...are "liberal Catholics"-just the kind who read and write for Commonwealbut in terms of standard secular liberalism, these essays would indicate Still Catholic that "liberal" and "Catholic" can be uncomfortable companions...

...when his rigor of feeling which reprints a small-press chapbook weakens, the poems sink into an almost THE FREE-VERSE conventions of con- published in 1971, persuades us again pietistic- complacency...

...priests (one a famous archbishop), a ing, and the poetry gets lost in the saying...

...He has always other characters into whose lives and tings often been more original and au- been a poet of rage, but now, in his midpesonalities we do get a real, if brief, thentic than the lives of the principals...

...safe passage between Scylla and It has always been the great flaw of terials he has drawn an occasionally stem Charybdis in matching furs...

...When his gold, labels of "liberal" and "conservative" poems display little or no sense of self- and a fiery dust showers into the quite miss the mark...

...Montjuich" in Ashes) which lack the The simultaneous publication of two clear intellectual focus of his better W.S...

...swers instead of stem Yeatsian truths...

...the giant in my front yard, bucking I imagine that being still a Catholic (This may have something to do with the and swaying in the wind and testifies to a necessary conserving, a long time these poets had to wait before hear its holding on to something with two their voices were widely heard...

...To get anything out of books like bungled...

...minor value...

...It is this sensibility of "those who coin a secular description for the position remain" that gives a common tone to taken by the authors it would have to be W HY still a Catholic...

...Give as far as I can see, the biographies and au- every/man and woman, the trees/ good as she got, no capitulation, no tobiographies of the stars are now being floating in the cold haze/of January...

...Except for Sidplaced in dramatic situations, and be- A man ney Callahan all are "cradle Catholics...

...is strongest when he disciplines himself the leaves overflow purple and Actually, the problem is that our secular away from this temptation...

...The result is a something else: of "conservatism" which marks all the facsimile of self-knowledge, soft an- I watch my eucalpytus, essays...

...The true spell a poem casts poems in both books ("Here and Now" 7 TEAas FROM sokLwnLaE issues from the often mysterous integrity and "Milkweed in 7 Years, for examPhilip Levine of the poem's nature, not from coy, self- ple, and "Everything" and Atheneum, $4.95, 70 pp...

...In the biographies and, even more, tally, as background for a scene whose and family, places, historical events-as in the autobiographies, the person the emphasis lay elsewhere, turned out really they compel his...

...Levine tidal roar...

...cause these dramatize the decisions of opened his paper and sighed, except for the venerable Fulton Sheen, selfhood (how, for example, we must somewhere all are "middle aged"-no young learn to live with what suffices, and how there was a world, alive and riot- people...

...My children don't go the Catholic Worker, Vatican II, but a volution for individuals and societies to church anymore...

...A poem's nature is self-contained dustblown landscape of the San Joaquin unanswered, that question and organic...

...There are Atheneum, $4.95, 66 pp...

...There are specific points on this may be an unexpected richness), ing, which the authors disagree...

...Oagination here and book is supposed to be about, the central well...

...I suspect that the real, hard- peace, an end/to promises, perhaps/an Howard Hawks-his anti-Semitism, his core audience for the fan magazines and end to us...

...As Sister Can- most of the writings...

...Not so in the Editor Delaney gives no clue how this also not secular conservatives as that conversion biographies of one's youth, particular collection of authors was cho- term tends to be applied...

...Father WHY CATHOLIC Karl Stern's Pillar of Fire or Thomas Greeley in a defense of what he calls Merton's Seven Storey Mountain...

...The best passages of Bacall's It's not surprising that the same should weariness of words, "as though the book are her ketches of some of Bogie's now prove true of Hollywood's earth/were tired of our talk/and wanted friends like the Mark Hellingers, or of memoirs...

...Moun- "Catholic anthropology" says: "The Sidney Callahan, John Deedy, Andrew tains and pillars are images of finality, Catholic view of the nature of human Greeley, James Hitchcock, Candida Lund, not flux...

...Paul VI is Levine risks a kind of melodrama which somewhere life as we had never seen as a failure by Greeley: "He will be has the absolute look of sincerity I men- known it went on and on, seen as one who came in the fullness of tioned earlier...

...The difference and communings...

...Di Piero new books by Philip Levine, one of poems...

...From these ma- The melancholy tone here strains at 12 October 1979: 567 self-dramatization, the language seems portant poems of all, and there are a few sen: three women (one a religious), three applied to rather than drawn from feel- of these in each of his two new books...

...Continuumists" are states and commitments...

...His anger feeds on he ever met Bacall to create a leading sort of ancillary activity to the reading of yearning, his wish to discover and speak lady who could "play a scene with a the magazines and gossip columns...

...He still points his anger at stiff-necked disapproval of his stars' the Hollywood press corps in general was anything that mocks or diminishes life, adultery, his relationship with his own people who didn't care very much about as in the cruel poetry of the factory in wife Slim, and the desire he had before going to movies, or who went only as a "The Life Ahead...

...on by the poet's hand...

...It must be said, however, but we were here, waiting time and understood nothing of that that in Levine's case this is a flaw of a because that was all we had time...

...Hitchcock, on the other hand, high order, commensurate with his high been brought here for, probably all concludes, "Where the Roman Catholic ambition...

...friends, one's children and even some rational path, free from bonds of parputative representatives of the church it- ticularism and tradition...

...But surround- proven more enjoyable, memorable and events but an instantaneous presence, ing this non-presence, ringing the outer durable than the blockbuster A's...

...The ominous ad- sense that a splendor has somewhere sometimes favored by various secular verb casts an air of tentativeness on all passed...

...In the strange new light thousand years of history already there...

...ASHES the poem may still be charming in away, But Levine is not always as demanding Philip Levine but mere charm is, or ought to be, a very of himself as he ought to be...

...Almost all of the essayists in society is 'reactionary' by the standards Richard P. McBrien, Abigail McCarthy, this interesting collection see themselves of liberal humanism which sees the indiFulton J. Sheen as "remainers" (hopefully not "remain- vidual as almost totally autonomous, John J. Delaney, ed...

...If one had to Dennis O'Brien self...

...it cannot be something laid Valley) as it overlays and collides with never to be asked again...

...Thus and Levine's language seeks to accomoedges of his or her story, are all sorts of have character roles and historical set- date this intense pressure...