Critics' choices for Christmas Traveling widely, reading closely (even eccentrically), and judging perspicaciously, our panel of Christmas critics has put together a list of titles that includes everything from an obedient Lassie to God's brilliantly wayward "biographer" And then there's the poetry and the theology Please share the good words
Hampl, Patricia
Patricia Hampl Patricia Hampl is the author of Virgin Time (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir. She is also the editor of Burning Bright (Ballantine), a new anthology of sacred poetry from...
...Sex and violence...
...It's efficient, highly charged, even snappy...
...I return to it after I've lost entirely the thread of the novel's plot that once grabbed me...
...The "right," while rightly affirming John Paul's defense of unborn life, quietly ignores his criticisms of economic individualism, the death penalty and ecological destruction...
...What has happened to the eternal presences...
...gives a good sampling of some of the notable poems published in the past year...
...he asks in a poem that, like others in the collection, attempts to get to the bottom of the contemporary ache for an "absent" God...
...By rights, Americans should be crazy for poetry...
...Perhaps the book's best splendor is the seemingly casual, immediate voice which manages to engage us in a story whose end the poet refuses to see as horrific, even as he fiercely exposes its heartbreaking details...
...The hard-scrabble Minnesota landscape is her setting, a terrain which, she says wryly, "is not the country for poetry...
...Benedict Groeschel, CFR land is to start with the annual Best American Poetry anthology...
...Edward Hirsch's Earthly Measures (Knopf, $20,93 pp...
...She is also the editor of Burning Bright (Ballantine), a new anthology of sacred poetry from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam...
...The 1995 edition, selected by Richard Howard (Houghton Mifflin, $13,303 pp...
...Simplicity and spareness are the hallmarks of her style...
...Fr...
...is dominated by the search for God...
...And we pass on...
...Poetry is sometimes classed with opera as a rarefied pleasure...
...We don't claim to be the "voice of the Pope," but in the tradition of lay reflection, we explore such topics as homeschooling, technology, sacred art, Christian environmentalism, social justice, simple living and much more...
...Some of the poems are in the voices of the victims, or of those left behind...
...Then move smartly on to Mark Doty's miraculous Atlantis (Harper Collins, $12, 103 pp...
...Maybe one reason poetry doesn't claim a bigger place in our reading is that we have lost the habit of reading a book of poems...
...When he sees the ocean-the salt spray hits you...
...Poetry stays on my shelves...
...If you are trying to transcend the shallow dichotomies, if you are striving for a whole Catholicism, you will most likely feel marginal, perhaps even alienated...
...Like Keats, Mark Doty is poised on exact perception...
...As William Carlos Williams, the great poet who also brooded on poetry's elusive fate in America, once wrote: It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there...
...At once orthodox and radical, hopeful and critical, we are intent on the sort of whole Catholicism the Holy Father proposes...
...Joyce Sutphen is a new voice, winner of the 1994 Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first book, Straight Out of View (Beacon, $12.95,106 pp...
...Contemporary poetry, especially, is chock-full of intimacies and private revelations...
...That is, we leave it alone...
...In spite of its relatively small readership, a lot of poetry gets published in America...
...In an age marked by a lack of idealism and by the pursuit of pleasure at all costs, Ctelum et Terra offers for thinking people a stimulating alternative...
...One way to get the lay of the Toward a Civilization of Love John Paul II, with a deep sense of mission and destiny, has repeatedly called on the world to build a civilization of love, a culture of life...
...Whether he writes of the factory towns of the Midwest, the luscious Europe of the south, the pilgrimages of his various heroes;-Henry James, Simone Weil, Orpheus-or about his own love, the poems are really about the mystery of the instinct to sing...
...W. Norton, $17.95 , 96 pp...
...For singing, the poet's task, is a gesture as unbidden as falling to one's knees...
...But that's all wrong...
...But for the most part, we leave poetry to the poets...
...In a letter-poem from the front, one soldier writes to his love: Dear Mattie, it's you I think of when I say my prayers, your face, it's you I'll want when I get back from this just like the night that I said Marry me and you said Yes, and the moon came from behind the cloud as I had wished it to, and I kissed your mouth, and then your chestnut hair...
...Her keen eye seems bred of a cherished, but never sentimentalized, farm girlhood...
...Poets see metaphor where others see only trouble...
...We see individual poems sprinkled in magazines like cartoons, used as graphic relief from long columns of prose...
...In her case, it is the "Spanish" flu epidemic of 1918 which killed more than 20 million people...
...Won't you join us...
...Yet as I look over my year's reading, I realize that among the many prose works piled up (novels and memoirs), I'm drawn back most to the poems...
...Though its vision of a just social order may seem impractical and unattainable, without such a vision we are lost...
...Maya Angelou reading her (I'm afraid-not very good) poem at President Bill Clinton's inauguration met with reverent response, was quoted at length on television and in the newspapers...
...We do occasionally give over to its powers...
...Some were books I reviewed, others I read because of someone else's review, or picked up because of the cover (I choose wine by the label, too...
...What these poets have in common is an immediacy of experience that is hard to find elsewhere...
...The reaction has been predictable: the "left" loudly rejects the Pope's critique of sexual individualism and his refusal to bend Catholic doctrine to the winds of modernity...
...In a series of elegantly framed fourteen-line poems, Voigt inhabits, rather than simply "tells," the story of this great, but largely neglected epilogue to the Great War...
...Or you could read Ctelum et Terra...
...Like Doty, Ellen Bryant Voigt has turned to a great pandemic for the subject of her majestic new book, Kyrie ON...
...His words offer us hope, but they also carry a profound challenge to the existing social order and to the ideological camps vying for its control...
...To say this collection is "about" AIDS and the culture of tragedy and courage that surrounds it, is only to say Mark Doty has found in the loss of his beloved Wally an emblem that springs open for us all...
...He wishes "to contemplate the humility of kneeling," he says in another poem...
...Ctelum et Terra (Latin for "heaven and earth") is a Catholic quarterly journal, the work of people who are enthusiastic for what Chesterton called the "wild truth" of Christianity...
...Oh yes-especially sex...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
