Margaret
Higgins, Anne
is a fine book--and Lawler must be a terrific lecturer. (The biographical note says he has taught at various middle western universities, published many books on religious matters, and...
...But be warned, Lawler can also befuddle: "But it is the hylomorphic complementarity engendering the transcending hypostasis that is of primary interest...
...It's the cusp of October, humid, tropical, storming through the long afternoon...
...Anne Higgins Chardin and to a sinologist, Joseph Needham, turns the analysis at the close of this four-page reflection to a characterization of Hopkins's poetic vision...
...If the moon answers to the name Old Woman Who Never Dies, what should I call her, whose waning hand holds mine as she pulls away from me into the air of the clean cold Sunday morning...
...Delirious, she's letting old secrets slip out around the oxygen mask...
...Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...Lawler begins each of his analytical chapters with a poem, which serves to anchor the discussion and provide links for the following development...
...HiUis Miller's blurb on the cover refers to the book as an "advanced introduction...
...Over and over again, Lawler can stop you in the midst of a poem with a discovery, a real disdosure...
...The case he makes against Martin's reading, using the same evidence, is persuasive enough, and one can almost feel the rush of pent-up energy as Lawler dismantles those who have invented a dark sexual side to a young man who was actually enmeshed in a struggle about whether or not to go over to Rome...
...The review of the critical literature is trenchant and very funny...
...The biographical note says he has taught at various middle western universities, published many books on religious matters, and contributed to Commonweal...
...Lawler gesticulates in print, practically slaps the podium in outrage at the nonsense written...
...The meditative analysis of the first line of "God's Grandeur," which begins his reading of the poems, moves from a technical classification of the language used to references to Wallace Stevens and Dr...
...They include a sense that there is one substructure or pattern in all verse, that the tradition really links all poems, and that Hopkins was a painstaking craftsman and immersed in the literary tradition...
...Justus Lawler has done justice for Father Hopkins...
...Lawler's reading rests on a few premises...
...His commanding voice is such that it is hard to resist him, decry his polysyllabic and polyglot manner as we might...
...Lawler's passion, intelligence, and daunting breadth of reference give the book its value...
...Given these, a reader can start anywhere in Hopkins and wind up everywhere, which is not altogether a bad description of what Lawler himself does...
...He loves Hopkins's poetry, admires the man, priest and poet, and makes a strong case for Hopkins as eternal child, anima candida, one more lost in wonder at a universe which speaks to him singularly rather than one which tells him he is isolated in his singularity...
...What day...
...Johnson, to a distinction between "grandeur" and "glory"--especially in terms of Ignatian spirituality...
...She's emptying the last closets where worries of the details of graduations, anguish of lost colleges, irreplaceable keys quiver in the corners...
...His style bears all the verbal signs of the lecturer's voice which jibes, unsettles, and makes extravagant claims in an effort to wake up the chap staring dully out the window...
...Commonweal ~ 7 October 23, 1998...
...The ragged breath slips and then catches on the edge of the cliff from which she hangs, and she's back in the bed, saying What day is it...
...Hopkins asserted in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" that "the just man justices...
...This is heady and illuminating stuff...
...He divides the chapters into subsections headed with subtitles in teasing puns (many of which link this work to the critical methodology of his earlier book), and his exegesis is brilliant if, at times, bewildering...
...A link to Teilhard de Margaret Her black Irish eyes, practical as tile, suddenly open like onyx wells as she snaps out of sleep...
...He cites precursor poems by Herbert, Vaughn, Donne, Marvel, Keats, and many others and puts Hopkins in a proper relationship with the tradition...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 18
