New Songs to the Lord

...Two other recent books, The Names of the Lost, by Philip Levine (Atheneum, 69 pp., $3.75), and Irving Feldman's Leaping Clear (Viking, 72 pp., $5.95) also show an attraction to Biblical themes?as well as a richer sense of the modern poetic range than David Rosenberg's...

...Unfortunately, too much of the inspiration seems to have come from a narrow conception of modern poetry...

...Weasal...

...Feldman concludes with a glorification of the created world and its Maker: Recalled from the labor of creation they were glancing as they flew, and saw looking out to them the shimmering of the million points to view...

...The Names of the Lost sings with the Psalmist that even in seeking answers, we can accept the ways of a God beyond our understanding...

...But an interesting exception to the prosaic mediocrity is Blues of the Sky (Harper & Row, 53 pp., $6.95...

...Leaping Clear is a major book by a supremely gifted writer who affirms that the perception and creation of poetry can be devotional acts...

...Rosenberg achieves his rhetorical effect by uncovering and sustaining tropes implicit in the texts...

...The title poem, describing a sabbath perambulation around New York City, best illustrates Feldman's perceptions...

...His liturgical cadences never pontificate: though he savor Lake Erie savor the rain burning down on Gary, Detroit, Wheeling though my grandmother argues the first cause of night and the kitchen cantor mumbles his names still the grave will sleep From the detritus of past and present suffering, Le vine can continue to scent a God who is "the odor of light/out of darkness, substance out of air/of blood before it reddens and runs...

...A verse from Psalm 73—literally, "I look to no one else in heaven"?flowers into "what else will I find/in the blues of the sky but you...

...the tired ghosts of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and the New York School may not, after all, offer the broadest modes of expression for a religious voice...

...I recognized a similarity between the 'stone-righteous' blues man and the psalmist: a resistance to superstition, cynicism, and self-righteousness, without the pretense of perfectly transcending them...

...One of the practical functions of religion is to remember our forebears...

...Blues of the Sky is no exception...

...Verse translations of the Psalter have never been very successful, though, probably because we associate the sonorous cadences of the King James Version with a familiar tradition in English poetry...

...In addition, most Biblical language scholars seem out of their depth in plain English...

...This uncompromising vision is more Biblical in spirit than all the optimistic freedom and space of Rosenberg's interpretations...

...Modern writers, the best of them included, tend to indulge themselves in fancy rhetoric about the dark night of the suburban soul, or new losses of innocence in the face of this wicked world...

...Besides the poems treating specifically religious themes, this volume includes such marvels as "Beethoven's Bust," a profound exploration of the relation between art and morality, and the experimental "Was...

...Even in 20 Psalms, Rosenberg's limitations threaten to become monotonous, and he tells us this is merely the prelude to future Biblical translations...

...there is an echo in these lines of Hopkins' foreboding "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves"), objects gradually dissolve into sea and air until the poet becomes "the open doorway to the empty marvel,/the first Atlantis of light...

...Similarly, the beautiful lament in captivity, "By the waters of Babylon," is seen, quite inappropriately, as an infantile fantasy: "Into the rivers of Babylon we cried like babies unwilling to move...

...Isn't...

...Most of Feldman's poetry is less transcendently joyous, though no less moving...

...In an earlier collection, he has affirmed, "There is no singing without God," and much of Leaping Clear is irradiated with the spirit of Psalm 19: "The heavens declare the glory of God...

...Still, for all his occasionally naive ideas and language, his versions have a curious attraction that a sophisticated or scholarly poet could not have achieved...

...Nevertheless, we read them today as the supreme poetry of the Judeo-Christian tradition—man speaking to his caring Creator...

...Among a recent spate of Bible translations, there have been numerous attempts to render these ancient hymns of praise in a voice both contemporary and suitably poetic...

...Deeply emotional, his verse avoids sentimentality through its simplicity...

...Father and Son" observes a family conflict where the father waits vainly for some Divine intervention—the sacrificial ram Abraham slew instead of his child...

...and the firmament showeth His handywork...

...His images are not always so felicitous...

...No help comes, but "Piercing the frozen scene,/is it his own?/or his son's?/or an ancient cry deafening his ear??the shriek this faithless toiling father hears/and one moment thinks a hesitant bleat/before he mingles death with his generations...

...The mass of the city now refracts the beams that everywhere proclaim, "I leap clear...

...Feldman is a passionate and powerful devotional poet...

...On Poetry NEW SONGS TO THE LORD BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In its palmiest days, secular poetry must still resign itself to a limited following: Now, as before, one has to be a guest at the banquet to hear the bard's epic...

...Whether evoking "Brooklyn's bright eroding shore," or the physical decay of Buffalo?City an instant above its falls"?he manages to infuse the tangible world with numinous significance...

...in practice, however, best-selling poetasters continue to grind out greeting-card sentiments destined for guest-room shelves...

...Indeed, the most familiar poems in Western culture are still to be found in Sepher Tehillim (the Hebrew means, literally, "Book of Praises"), known in English as the Book of Psalms...

...Sometimes, in fact, Rosenberg is capable of the most imaginative poetic transformations...

...Levine's plain style is like a drink of cold water after a diet of soft drinks...

...Thus he transports the agrarian imagery of the first Psalm to an urban environment: Happy the one stepping lightly over paper hearts of men and out of the way of mind-locked reality the masks of sincerity he steps from his place at the glib cafe to find himself in the world of the infinite Though it would take a more mundane translation to ascertain that "the world of the infinite" is actually "the Law of the Lord," Rosenberg usually stays in touch with the original, often quite cleverly...

...And too often the Lord is extolled as a shepherd "who keeps me from wanting what I can't have," or praised as That Great Consciousness-Raiser In The Sky, whose job is "opening the mind from social failures...

...They may well have evolved as corporate hymns, borrowed from neighboring Near Eastern religions...

...It might also be recalled that Rosenberg's namesake, King David, to whom the Psalms are traditionally attributed, was willing to look foolish in the eyes of men to praise the Lord...

...a roaring lion" becomes, by some strange and unattractive metamorphosis, "mindless megaphones of hate...

...Philip Levine unflinchingly considers his own bereavements, "alone in the dark/waiting for something,/a flash of light, a song,/a remembered sweetness/from all the lives I've lost...

...Dreamers like Vachel Lindsay, it is true, have prophesied the epiphany of popular verse forms that would appeal to both proletariat and intelligentsia...

...First seen an "Excrescence, excrement, earth/belched in buildings...

...a desire not to sound smarter than one is, and to let one's heaviest feelings resonate in a gentle irony and become lightened in a harmonics of repetition...

...Biblical translations generally claim, like the original, to be inspired...

...For example, in the same Psalm, he changes the simile of the ungodly man as "chaff which the wind driveth away" (King James) into "bitter men turn dry/blowing in the wind/like yesterday's paper...

...Its author, David Rosenberg, has "interpreted" 20 Psalms, trying "to rediscover their quality of spokenness in modern poetic terms...

...Rosenberg employs a three-line stanza loosely based on the blues, which he asserts are a form of American liturgy, since they derive from gospel spirituals...

...It was almost," says Rosenberg modestly, "as if something would take my hand or mind and give me the shape of the whole poem...

...To see Brooklyn so on a sabbath afternoon from the heights, to be there beyond the six days, the chronicle of labors, to stand in the indestructable space, encompass the world into whose center you fly, and be the light looking...