Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry.

Edited by Robert Arwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal Oxford University Press, $35, 595 pp.

Maybe he looked indeed/much as Rembrandt envisioned him" wrote the late lamented Denise Levertov, but, in fact, we will never know. However, there is no end to those who wish to provide us a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth. What is true of the visual arts is equally true of the belletristic tradition. This wonderful anthology of poetry inspired by Jesus and his life demonstrates both the polysemic nature of Jesus as he is understood in the tradition and the ways in which his life has been read throughout the centuries by people of various cultures.

The editors organized this book according to the chronology of the Gospels, anchoring each incident, as they say, with poems that most literally follow the text of the Bible. Most of the usual suspects - Dante, Milton, Peguy, Hopkins, etc. - are here. But what makes this collection so intriguing is how it introduces us to unfamiliar poets from unexpected places. Such poets range from the Swiss priest, Thomas Immoos, who has spent his entire adult life in Japan ("Lord, have mercy on us!/Have mercy on your children in the firestorm of Nagasaki...") to the young Nigerian poet Funso Avejina whose poetic sequence "And so it came to pass..." is a prophetic critique of political and social corruption. This wide spectrum includes Korean, Japanese, Latin American, and even Muslim poets from the Middle East. Who could not be struck by the tercet of the Bengali poet Nirenda Chakrabart? It was written as he rides a bus through his native city: "I look at the sky and I look at you/child of a beggar-mother, Christ of Calcutta." It is poems like that, written from an angle that is not Western and with a vocabulary that is unexpected, that please so much.

This anthology also has a nice balance between the contemporary and the past. The editors go back to early patristic authors like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria, provide a fair selection from the Syriac patristic tradition whose theology is almost always done in poetry and hymns, through the medievals like Dante and Jacopone da Todi to the early modern and into the modern period. Not all of the poets wrote in a devotional mode. I was much struck, for example, by a simple poem, brilliant in its artistic conceit, by the surrealist poet and social critic Jacques Prevert. He writes of the Last Supper: "They are at table/they eat not/Nor touch their plates/and their plates stand straight up/Behind their heads." Jesus, of course, is also a person social activists could use to strike out at middle-class religion; thus Sarah Cleghorn's final quatrain of a poem on the trial of Jesus: "Ah, let no local him refuse/Comrade Jesus has paid his dues./Whatever other be debarred/Comrade Jesus has his red card."

This is a book to browse or, for the preacher, to mine. It also provides the opportunity to spend some time grumbling about the omission of one's favorite poems. At any rate, it is a wonderful read, full of new poems (at least, new to me) as well as welcoming the old poems which, once, everyone with any Catholic culture would have known at least in passing. For those poets who are unknown to us, the full bibliographies in the credits provide further resources to discover. I loved this book.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.