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Linking the notion of atonement to personal memories, Harris' writing has an undeniable therapeutic purpose. In portraits of her mother and father as well as childhood vignettes, she makes up for what was not said, what was not understood. When dealing with the present, however, her poems can border on the sentimental, in the mold of the poet looking at a tree, her daughter, her husband, etc., and sharing thoughts so deep. That said, there is much to enjoy and appreciate in Harris' fine book.
In The Fall & Other Poems, Joseph Bottum shares Harris' knack for finding the theological in the ordinary. For Bottum, autumn evokes nothing less than "The Fall": "The thick remains of sin are coursing / through October's trees to splatter / red New England's sky with leaves." By contrast, winter offers a hope, difficult to fathom:
Deep in snow New England holds
lovely, silent, finished, clean.
What mercy after such forgiveness?
What resurrection waits on spring?
Not one to let an image rest in peace, Bottum makes his point about grace rhetorically, as in the book's first poem when he asks, "who's thanked the Lord for broken things?"
Unabashed about his faith, Bottum is also unafraid to show a love for alliteration and traditional verse forms. Seeking "Restoration," he comments on the debasing of love to lust: "our speech / is shoddy-stuffed with winding sheets." In the pursuit of the right rhyme and meter, however, his rich language sometimes weakens: a "whole" finds a "bole," "now" a "bough," and standing on the "strand," the poet hears, with a somewhat tin ear for diction, "the constant rollers break." Fortunately, Bottum's delightful humor saves his collection from both conventional writing and conventional wisdom. In a book review in rhyming couplets, he brilliantly trashes an anthology of "Modern Catholic Verse." He concludes with a charitable twist of the knife: "But most of this work is not good and not bad. / It's just pious and worthy and terribly sad." Bottum is at the top of his form when he succeeds in blending the pious with a mordant wit.
In contrast to Bottum's love of traditional faith and form, Bruce Beasley aims at poetical innovation and a critical examination of Christianity in his collection Signs and Abominations. The introductory poem, "What Did You Come to See," considers a painting of John the Baptist:
I stared at his finger
crooked toward the business of the cross,
clumped vein over bone in the twisted wrist,
and barely glanced toward Calvary.
Signs, abominations:
it's always the diversion
that attracts me,
what doesn't mean to be seen that I need
to stare down
To give an example of what attracts Beasley, his "Spiritual Alphabet in Midsummer" comments under the letter "P":
Walking the dogs,
talking about graces and sins,
docetic heresy and Incarnation,
plastic bags of scooped dogshit
swinging in our hands.
Is this the sign of a piercing poetic vision finding the sacred in the profane, or merely of self-conscious sophistication? To quote a wise line by Bottum, Beasley often "shocks by supposing that shocking is new." Although he presents Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson as his models, he lacks their ironic finesse. In "Hyperlinks: Incomplete Void," he begins with a reference to John Calvin's catechism and its presentation of regeneration. The poem then shifts, with an ironic click of the mouse, to the mention that "A blood in the semen webpage / has been created." The result is somewhat cold and, as in many of the poems, intellectually overwrought.
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