The Apocrypha of Limbo.

RALPH DE TOLEDANO is known as an author and journalist. He is also a poet, a God-haunted artist of profound learning, the breadth of whose reading and the depth of whose thought make his poems challenging in their heuristic reach.

Moving through The Apocrypha of Limbo we come upon "David Antiphons," "The Small Gospel of Peter," "Epilogue to the Book of Job," the "Testament of Herod," and the "Prologue to the Book of Jesse." Titles that beckon to us. And two others, "Lament for Deutero-Jeremiah," and "Koheleth in Captivity." What's that? I thrashed around and learned that Koheleth is the Hebrew name for the Book of Ecclesiastes, meaning teacher or preacher, and in that poem one finds more than the "limping meter" of the original.

Toledano, avocationally an eminent music critic, makes his own music with these poems. His voice throughout is unique, in part because his diction is here and there more that of the critic than that of a poet. Each man needs to seek out his own approach to the ineffable, the God who cannot be verbalized, whose sustenance of the world is at the center of this book.

Toledano launches with "Three Devotions," beginning:

Who seeks God's love seeks nothing.

Against the measurable span

of finite longing, hope delimited,

God's love is less and more than love,

not to be given or withheld

but there in the eternal abyss

of all creation. Who seeks

in life more than the benediction 

of God's presence, lacking love

or hate or anything but the Presence,

covets a hurricane in a thimble.

God's love is a Biblical theme (nobody loved Zeus or Baal), eternally renewable, but a theme that carries with it the danger of pietism or banalities. Toledano never slips. Like other fine poets he can write a bad line, e.g., "gauges the irremedial span." No matter. It occurs in the third of the "Three Devotions," which closes with the lines:

In these my private devotions

there is only the adequacy of not

enough

as when the mind returns

to the overscrutiny of the public

square.

In the empyrean of his religious mode, the poet never loses sight of earth.

In "The Small Gospel of Peter," we find Peter walking on Calvary after the crucifixion, "dry-eyed like a woman thrifty of her tears."

Here where three solitary stumps

push upward

barren to the reaching sky, I walk

unslippered

in the ashen night, blood mingling

with the dew

of sweated earth, beyond the grip of

measure,

pierced by forever and worried by

now.

That closing line can be taken as commentary on the poems in The Apocrypha of Limbo with their irony and their anguish, where the city becomes the metaphor for the God-estranged society, the whole an appeal to God for understanding. "Belabor me, O Lord, and find my God," he cries out.

There is opacity in Toledano's poems, perhaps inevitable in the pursuit of Biblically inspired and metaphysical themes in poems where the language is plain enough but the poem itself is a metaphor. In other poems he skips about literature and history: Tybalt talking to Juliet as she lies in the crypt, Guinevere refusing to see King Arthur, Herod at Christ's empty tomb, Jeremiah back from Babylon. One of his finest poems is written in Spanish on the death of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, entitled "Muerte del Poeta," worthy to stand beside the works of that man. And one of the longest poems is "Prologue to the Book of Jesse," father of David, first forebear of the Son of Man, which is to be read as a fable for our time, for all time. Some of its gist is caught up in three lines:

party to a dream that a man's

defiance

is not a gesture in the gale, a

stuttered cry,

but somber music walled against

time.

That, too, is commentary on these poems, which are as contemporary as the chiming hour, touched by eternal themes, pierced by forever and worried by now."