Critics' choices for Christmas
Bergonzi, Bernard
Bernard Bergonzi Bernard Bergonzi, a longtime contributor, writes from Warwickshire, England. His biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic brother, Tom, is forthcoming from Oxford University...
...Maitland is in the line of traditional natural theology in saying that we only know God by his effects...
...If consciousness is now a central concern of philosophers and neurologists, it has been equally so for novelists ever since the end of the nineteenth century...
...His poems were published posthumously...
...in the past these were supposed to reflect the calm supreme ruler of a hierarchical and structured order of things...
...A God who is prepared to watch galaxies burn themselves away...
...She picks up this traditional phrase by asking us to think about the many different senses of the verb "to make...
...His life story has been well told by Dominic Hibberd in Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Ivan Dee, $30,424 pp...
...and God made it...
...He deserves this fine edition.edition...
...His biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic brother, Tom, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...to have humans develop absolutely unique thumbprints-one by one across several hundreds of millennia...
...God made the world": how is this like making up one's mind, making things happen, making a friend, making peace, making war, making love...
...He is an unfashionable but admirable poet, whose work is often difficult and often rewarding...
...I found her book, despite its brash and sometimes gushing style, eminently thoughtful and provocative of thought (and of questions and disagreement...
...Hibberd presents a very complex personality, unlike the two-dimensional "protest poet" that Owen is sometimes turned into...
...Davie began as a Cambridge-educated Little Englander, in close touch with his Yorkshire nonconformist roots, but he soon enlarged his physical and intellectual horizons...
...It is for experts to say whether Maitland is promoting a new version of process theology...
...I must declare an interest, since I helped the editor, my former student Neil Powell, to locate some of Davie's earliest poems...
...Now, says Maitland, "We have a God who is abundantly creative and extremely intelligent...
...As with those poets, I tend to prefer the earlier work, which took the form of sad, precise, witty moral reflections...
...One doesn't want to be made to think too often in life, but now and then it can be salutary...
...He was prolific, both as poet and critic, and his Collected Poems is a large volume (Carcanet, $24.95 [paper], 660 pp...
...Lodge illuminatingly develops ideas set out in his last novel, Thinks...
...one who lets the continents themselves crawl or drift clumsily across the planet...
...Among the other essays on English and American novelists from Dickens to Martin Amis, I particularly enjoyed "Henry James and the Movies...
...obtainable in the United States from IPG, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL, 60610...
...Owen wanted to be a poet from the beginning...
...We follow Owen from his provincial, lower-middle-class origins, through his attempts to get a decent education, and his increasing love of poetry, first of the English Romantics and later of the French Decadents...
...just before his death he was awarded the Military Cross...
...where he dramatized this opposition...
...The repetitions work like Zen aphorisms rather than systematic exposition...
...His own time there in 1917 was comparatively short but intensely traumatic, and ended when Owen was blown into the air by a shell exploding nearby...
...she also confesses to understanding mathematics...
...Davie moved to America, and taught at Stanford and later at Vander-bilt for many years, until he returned to England on retirement...
...Wilfred Owen, who fell in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the end of World War I, is now remembered as the finest poet of that war...
...After he had recovered from shellshock, Owen returned to the front and fought valiantly...
...She faces head-on those areas of science that for many people have marginalized or undermined traditional religious belief: cosmology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience...
...In this book, Lodge's parallel but separate careers as novelist and critic harmoniously converge...
...The Garden Party," which Davie published nearly fifty years ago, is one of the few poems I know by heart...
...They show us, she says, an astonishing world that we should inhabit with joy...
...Although he came to think of himself as a "pacifist in uniform," he was known as a very soldierly young officer, and a crack shot...
...Two dead poets have been recently commemorated in fitting style...
...He became a critical admirer of Ezra Pound, and was devoted to the poetry of Pasternak, which he read in Russian...
...She is a feminist and a Catholic convert, a novelist and a theologian...
...Being nothing if not ambitious, she wants to provoke some new ways of thinking about God in a very short book, and to a remarkable extent she succeeds...
...to allow black holes and quarks to play tricks on time...
...Donald Davie died in 1995 at the age of seventy-three...
...The book indicates that, like those nineteenth-century poets who did not die young, Davie kept on writing till the end...
...This was my response to Sara Maitland's Awesome God: Creation, Commitment, and Joy (the American edition is called A Joyful Theology, Augsburg, $11.99,144 pp...
...And at the same time profligate, careless, open-hearted, and not in a hurry...
...David Lodge's recent interest in neuroscience and contemporary debates about consciousness has been developed in a lively collection of lectures and essays, Consciousness and the Novel (Harvard University Press, $24.95,320 pp...
...He came to acknowledge his homosexuality, and was fascinated by wounds and mutilation and the deaths of beautiful young men well before he encountered these in the trenches...
Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 21
