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Contemporary poetry usually doesn't make me think of catechism class. But upon receiving five books to review for this article, I was brought back to Tuesday nights, the church basement, and questions and answers on human misery, deliverance, and gratitude. For when poets give their books such loaded titles as The Fall, Signs and Abominations, Atonement, or Waiting for the Paraclete, it is fair to ask if the intent is in any way theological. In other words, do these collections indicate a desire to tackle spiritual questions through verse? Or are these titles the sign of ambiguous appropriation, seizing upon the richness of religious imagery without embracing its sense? The answer is somewhere in a poetically religious middle, as talented writers put the faith they have—or had—into poetry.
David Citino's collection The Invention of Secrecy takes perhaps the most conventional route by presenting faith as something that has lapsed into an element of poetical reflection. The initial poem begins with memories of delivering the newspaper before the morning Mass. Returning to the present, Citino sights the comet Hale-Bopp:
Never
have I seen my own going so radiant,
the sky lightening, the beauty of my death
twisting slowly its long, glittering trail.
In the title poem, he remembers "Saying the Latin answers at the Mass" and hearing "a new music." This public connection contrasts with the privacy of reading silently, of "deceiving ourselves into believing / that, alone, we could be complete, / silent, we would not grow too full." In another poem, "The Harrowing of Hell," Citino argues that if hell were to exist, its horror would be "the thoughts of one mind, lukewarm, / too intent, too alone."
Amid such secrecy, hope still springs like faith, eternally misguided, according to Citino. As a youth, he could believe that angels floated above Cleveland. Now he realizes "we're suckers for cartoon promises." But Citino still wonders "what happens / when the poem ends?" In the book's final poem, "Sky Burial," he calls upon birds to consume his dead body, fly up to the sky, and then drop his seed "to bless / the soil." By springtime, he will "rise / from roots on tentative stems, / stand up in crowns of new green, / robes of carmine, ocher, blue." Rejecting any idea of heaven, Citino takes Christian vocabulary to present decomposition as a thing of celestial radiance.
Like Billy Collins, Citino knows how to maintain a reader's interest, from a "photo-booth tryst" to the tourist-shop canonization of Princess Di and Gianni Versace ("Santa Bulimia" and "St. Cool"). With a lightness of line and tone, his poems often echo in their emptiness, while others suggest a desire for renewed linguistic and spiritual communion.
In Atonement, Judith Harris uses a simple style not for ironic effect but to provide a graceful presentation of her family and Jewish upbringing. She recalls the "cold shoulder" of the displayed Torah, the congregation
parted and flowing
through two paths up the aisle
the coming and the going,
waiting for God's judgment
from the birth of the round world
to the day of atonement,
As a child, she thought God resembled her father, angry, "middle-aged and adrift, / in the motionless garden." In the title poem, Harris describes a trip to the market that turns into a reflection on the God she seeks:
I want to keep it simple
I want to ask God to forgive me.
When I die, I want
to walk out of my body, whole
the way someone walks out of a house
on an ordinary errand.
Harris hopes to taste of "this one gold-armored apple," "not out of hunger, but love." In her book, there is little question of the Messiah, except to say in the poem "Waiting" that "He does not come." While Harris does not use poetry to promote a specific faith, Jewish or Christian, she expresses the desire for a new relationship with God, to be a new Eve in the garden, with "more light to break in."
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