Critics' choices for Christmas: Bernard Bergonzi.

One doesn't want to be made to think too often in life, but now and then it can be salutary. 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.). She is a feminist and a Catholic convert, a novelist and a theologian; she also confesses to understanding mathematics. 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. She faces head-on those areas of science that for many people have marginalized or undermined traditional religious belief: cosmology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience. They show us, she says, an astonishing world that we should inhabit with joy; and God made it. She picks up this traditional phrase by asking us to think about the many different senses of the verb "to make." "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? The repetitions work like Zen aphorisms rather than systematic exposition. Maitland is in the line of traditional natural theology in saying that we only know God by his effects; in the past these were supposed to reflect the calm supreme ruler of a hierarchical and structured order of things. Now, says Maitland, "We have a God who is abundantly creative and extremely intelligent. And at the same time profligate, careless, openhearted, and not in a hurry. A God who is prepared to watch galaxies burn themselves away; to allow black holes and quarks to play tricks on time; to have humans develop absolutely unique thumbprints--one by one across several hundreds of millennia; one who lets the continents themselves crawl or drift clumsily across the planet." It is for experts to say whether Maitland is promoting a new version of process theology; I found her book, despite its brash and sometimes gushing style, eminently thoughtful and provocative of thought (and of questions and disagreement).

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.). 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. Lodge illuminatingly develops ideas set out in his last novel, Thinks ..., where he dramatized this opposition. Among the other essays on English and American novelists from Dickens to Martin Amis, I particularly enjoyed "Henry James and the Movies." In this book, Lodge's parallel but separate careers as novelist and critic harmoniously converge.

Two dead poets have been recently commemorated in fitting style. 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. His life story has been well told by Dominic Hibberd in Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (Ivan Dee, $30, 424 pp.). 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. Hibberd presents a very complex personality, unlike the two-dimensional "protest poet" that Owen is sometimes turned into. Owen wanted to be a poet from the beginning. 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. 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. 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. After he had recovered from shellshock, Owen returned to the front and fought valiantly; just before his death he was awarded the Military Cross. His poems were published posthumously.

Donald Davie died in 1995 at the age of seventy-three. He was prolific, both as poet and critic, and his Collected Poems is a large volume (Carcanet, $24.95 [paper], 660 pp.; obtainable in the United States from IPG, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL, 60610). I must declare an interest, since I helped the editor, my former student Neil Powell, to locate some of Davie's earliest poems. The book indicates that, like those nineteenth-century poets who did not die young, Davie kept on writing till the end. As with those poets, I tend to prefer the earlier work, which took the form of sad, precise, witty moral reflections. "The Garden Party," which Davie published nearly fifty years ago, is one of the few poems I know by heart. 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. He became a critical admirer of Ezra Pound, and was devoted to the poetry of Pasternak, which he read in Russian. Davie moved to America, and taught at Stanford and later at Vanderbilt for many years, until he returned to England on retirement. He is an unfashionable but admirable poet, whose work is often difficult and often rewarding. He deserves this fine edition.

Bernard Bergonzi, a longtime contributor, writes from Warwickshire, England. His biography of Matthew Arnold's Catholic brother, Tom, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.