Upholding Mystery.

Upholding Mystery An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry David Impastato, editor Oxford, $25, 369 pp.

According to an oft invoked joke, writers of poetry currently outnumber readers. Despite the increasing popularity of poetry slams and festivals, we Americans do not read poetry at the rate we read papers, magazines, mysteries, novels, and nonfiction. The general press, and even established reviews like the New York Times Book Review, rarely pay attention to new volumes of poetry.

It is against this background that the unusual design of David Impastato's anthology of contemporary Christian poetry makes sense. Impastato seeks the widest possible audience for these poems, an audience which includes persons who do not normally read contemporary verse, persons who will read to enrich their faith lives, as well as readers of contemporary poetry who want to discover what kinds of poems religiously engaged poets are writing. To make the volume inviting to these disparate readers, Impastato has eschewed standard anthology practices. He has limited the number of included poets to fifteen. He has organized the poems thematically, into sixteen "major areas of Christian attention," ranging from "The Cross" to "Wayfarers" to "The Holy." He has interspersed the poems with generous orienting notes, which should be particularly helpful for people intimidated by poetry.

Impastato's muse in making these editorial choices is the poet-scholar Jonathan Holden. Not only did Holden's The Fate of American Poetry introduce Impastato to the five least familiar poets included in the anthology--Scott Cairns, David Citino, David Craig, David Brendan Hopes, Andrew Hudgins--but it also provided him with a manifesto on behalf of accessibility. Holden argues that his fellow academics have driven away readers by making a fetish of poetic difficulty and promoting poets and poetic movements (such as modernism) which have terrified a general readership. I disagree with both Holden's definition of difficulty and his argument against it, and this disagreement forms my reservations about Impastato's anthology.

First, strong praise: The anthology is a cornucopia of good poets and accomplished poems. In addition to the poets mentioned above, Impastato includes Richard Wilbur, Kathleen Norris, Les Murray, Denise Levertov, Geoffrey Hill, Louise Erdrich, Sister Maura Eichner, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Father Daniel Berrigan. This is a wonderful and diverse group. Generational differences emerge with astonishing clarity: The younger poets tend to work with narrative and personae, and draw on a faith strongly inflected by ethnicity. The older poets, by contrast, grapple with artistic and religious tradition.

For readers who have already enjoyed the work of the established poets, the lesser-known ones will be a revelation. Cairns conceals a strenuous belief under a designedly diffident voice; Craig writes incantatory catalogues; in his lush language, Hopes praises what might be called the "thinginess" of being. Hudgins revisits religious scenes too early declared depleted, and boldly dances on the precipice of the maudlin. His "At the Piano," in which a woman tearfully recalls to her second husband a traumatic childhood event (she led the congregation in song while her preacher father was beaten by thugs), is unforgettable, religiously and psychologically full, blending comedy and terror in a manner reminiscent of the best Flannery O'Connor. By contrast, his "Praying Drunk" squanders the rhyme between despair and prayer: "Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair--/whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer." The echo provides no insight, and makes the speaker sound like a greeting card rather than the half-cocked seeker that Hudgins wants to limn. Contrast Hudgins's lines with Emily Dickinson's renunciation of love: "You there--I--here /With just the Door ajar/That Oceans are--and Prayer--/And that White Sustenance--/Despair." Her stunning rhyme, achieved in the context of a difficult, blasphemous, and antiromantic poem, will not let us repress the absence always throbbing within prayer. The more you linger over her arrangement, the more it yields. Though all the anthologized poets are good storytellers and engaging writers, and many of them masterly stylists (for example, Richard Wilbur), only Geoffrey Hill consistently sustains that level of attention to language.

Reading Upholding Mystery is like visiting a museum where the pictures are arranged by subject rather than painter and chronology. To look at a room of pictures depicting the crucifixion is an entirely different aesthetic experience from standing in a room given over to the work of Giotto and Cimabue. The former might be more spiritually and aesthetically intense, as one takes in aspects of the represented event, and stops fretting over the who's who of art. But it equally might exaggerate the whole issue of quality and qualitative difference. What clearly is put off to the side in this more postmodern arrangement is sustained attention to the particular labor of the individual artist. I realized in reading the anthology that I am hopelessly Romantic: For me, poetry is the human person striving for adequate language against the pull of (a religiously superior) silence. I finally felt I had heard the poems when I went back and read through the book poet by poet. This is not easy to do since the volume lacks an index and has a bewildering table of contents.

In his introductory remarks about the parallels between a postmodern and a Christian sensibility, Impastato hedges about whether the author and his or her intentions matter. He imagines that, because the Bible has "all individuality of authorship ... smashed out of it," the Christian poet is "comfortable with the 'polyphony of self' that language [in the postmodern view] is said to mirror." Such a view is exasperatingly incomplete: Saint Paul understood the polyphony of self, and credited it as the source of our most intense anguish (see Romans 6:14-25). It is telling that Impastato includes no poems which consider the uncomfortable difficulties of writing poetry, particularly Christian poetry (poems like Geoffrey Hill's "God's Little Mountain," "Three Baroque Meditations," or the more recent "Cycle"). Despite allusions to Auschwitz, alcoholism, domestic violence, environmental degradation, and animal experimentation, this collection seems more genial than our age deserves, and this is because difficulty--whether located in language, the act of composition, the struggle to believe, or the poet's grappling with a Romantic legacy of competition between poets and God--is disallowed.

Finally, I very much missed the voices of two superlative Catholic poets, Elizabeth Sewell and Sarah Appleton. Their work is attentive, beautiful, and transforming.

Daria Donnelly is a free-lance writer. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.