Upholding Mystery Edited by David Impastato
Donnelly, Daria
PARSING THE SILENCE Upholdlna Mystery An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry David Impastato, editor Oxford, $25,369pp Daria Donnelly According to an oft invoked joke, writers of poetry...
...I disagree with both Holden's definition of difficulty and his argument against it, and this disagreement forms my reser-vations about Impastato's anthology...
...I finally felt I had heard the poems when I went back and read through the book poet by poet...
...The for-mer might be more spiritually and aes-thetically intense, as one takes in aspects of the represented event, and stops fretting over the who's who of art...
...Not only did Holden's The Fate of American Poetry introduce Impastato to the five least familiar poets included in the anthology-Scott Cairns, David Citino, David Craig, David Bren-dan Hopes, Andrew Hudgins-but it also provided him with a manifesto on behalf of accessibility...
...Cairns conceals a strenuous belief under a designedly diffident voice...
...By contrast, his "Praying Drunk" squanders the rhyme between despair and prayer: "Forgive me...
...Craig writes incantatory catalogues...
...The older poets, by contrast, grapple with artistic and religious tradition...
...This is not easy to do since the volume lacks an index and has a bewildering table of contents...
...The more you linger over her arrangement, the more it yields...
...Despite allusions to Auschwitz, alcoholism, domestic vi-olence, environmental degradation, and animal experimentation, this collection seems more genial than our age de-serves, and this is because difficulty- whether located in language, the act of composition, the struggle to believe, or the poet's grappling with a Romantic legacy of competition between poets and God-is disallowed...
...Such a view is exasperatingly incomplete: Saint Paul understood the polyphony of self, and credited it as the source of our most intense anguish (see Romans 6:14-25...
...In his introductory remarks about the parallels between a postmodern and a Christian sensibility, Impastato hedges about whether the author and his or her intentions matter...
...Contrast Hudgins's lines with Emily Dickinson's renunciation of love: "You there-I-here-/With just the Door ajar/That Oceans are-and Prayer-/And that White Sustenance- /Despair...
...What clearly is put off to the side in this more postmodern arrangement is sustained attention to the particular labor of the individual artist...
...Impastato seeks the widest possible audience for these poems, an audience which includes persons who do not normally read contemporary verse, persons who will read to enrich their faith lives, as well as readers of con-temporary poetry who want to discov-er what kinds of poems religiously engaged poets are writing...
...First, strong praise: The anthology is a cornucopia of good poets and accom-plished poems...
...He has limited the number of included poets to fifteen...
...It is against this background that the unusual design of David Impastato's anthology of contemporary Christian poetry makes sense...
...He has in-terspersed the poems with generous orienting notes, which should be par-ticularly helpful for people intimidated by poetry...
...PARSING THE SILENCE Upholdlna Mystery An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry David Impastato, editor Oxford, $25,369pp Daria Donnelly According to an oft invoked joke, writers of poetry cur-rently outnumber readers...
...in his lush lan-guage, Hopes praises what might be called the "thinginess" of being...
...The general press, and even established reviews like the New York Times Book Review, rarely pay attention to new volumes of poetry...
...This is a won-derful and diverse group...
...Impastato's muse in making these editorial choices is the poet-scholar Jon-athan Holden...
...It is telling that Impastato includes no poems which consider the uncom-fortable difficulties of writing poetry, particularly Christian poetry (poems like Geoffrey Hill's "God's Little Mountain," "Three Baroque Meditations," or the more recent "Cycle...
...Her stunning rhyme, achieved in the context of a difficult, blasphe-mous, and antiromantic poem, will not let us repress the absence always throb-bing within prayer...
...For readers who have already enjoyed the work of the established poets, the lesser-known ones will be a revelation...
...Reading Upholding Mystery is like vis-iting a museum where the pictures are arranged by subject rather than painter and chronology...
...His "At the Piano," in which a woman tearfully re-calls to her second husband a traumatic childhood event (she led the congre-gation in song while her preacher father was beaten by thugs), is unforgettable, religiously and psychologically full, blending comedy and terror in a man-ner reminiscent of the best Flannery O'Connor...
...I realized in reading the anthology that I am hope-lessly Romantic: For me, poetry is the human person striving for adequate lan-guage against the pull of (a religiously superior) silence...
...Hudg-ins revisits religious scenes too early de-clared depleted, and boldly dances on the precipice of the maudlin...
...In addition to the poets mentioned above, Impastato includes Richard Wilbur, Kathleen Norris, Les Murray, Denise Levertov, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Erdrich, Sister Maura Eich-ner, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Father Daniel Berrigan...
...Holden argues that his fellow academics have driven away readers by making a fetish of po-etic difficulty and promoting poets and poetic movements (such as modernism) which have terrified a general readership...
...Their work is attentive, beautiful, and transforming...
...This is my favorite sin: despair-/whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer...
...But it equally might exaggerate the whole issue of quality and qualitative differ-ence...
...Finally, I very much missed the voic-es of two superlative Catholic poets, Elizabeth Sewell and Sarah Appleton...
...The echo provides no insight, and makes the speaker sound like a greeting card rather than the half-cocked seeker that Hudgins wants to limn...
...To make the volume inviting to these disparate read-ers, Impastato has eschewed standard an-thology practices...
...To look at a room of pic-tures depicting the crucifixion is an en-tirely different aesthetic experience from standing in a room given over to the work of Giotto and Cimabue...
...He imagines that, be-cause the Bible has "all individuality of authorship...smashed out of it," the Christian poet is "comfortable with the 'polyphony of self that language [in the postmodern view] is said to mirror...
...Though all the anthologized poets are good storytellers and engaging writers, and many of them masterly stylists (for example, Richard Wilbur), only Geoffrey Hill consistently sustains that level of at-tention to language...
...Generational differences emerge with astonishing clarity: The younger poets tend to work with narrative and personae, and draw on a faith strongly inflected by ethnici-ty...
...He has organized the poems thematically, into sixteen "major areas of Christian at-tention," ranging from "The Cross" to "Wayfarers" to "The Holy...
...Despite the increasing pop-ularity of poetry slams and festivals, we Americans do not read poetry at the rate we read papers, magazines, mysteries, novels, and nonfiction...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
