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Hansen would have it that the man who gave up poetry for God takes it up again in knee–jerk response to a story in the paper. Is inspiration so mechanical as that? Does this not misunderstand the process of the poet, miss the point of silence, of long days of no words rhymed, no rhythms marked out on the page, the poet, though, at work perhaps most truly then. In my book, a writer is a writer is a writer, and just because you're not covering a page with ink at any given moment (or in any given decade) doesn't mean that you're not on the job. Writing is a way of being in the world, and if that's not true of Hopkins, where shall lesser scribblers stand?

There is a great deal of nodding in this book. Hat tipped in the direction of sexual orientation, Catholic conversion, bipolar illness, God, devotion, a friend's artistic rivalry, family friction, even down to de rigueur glimpses of the hardened nipples of the comely nun emerging from her bath on a frosty morning. By p. 37, Hansen is strip–mining Hopkins' poetry: plotted and pierced, gear, tackle, trim. (This is not admiration's quoting phrase or line, but rather, word. In many ways this is a book of words, with poetry and meaning wanted.) Matters of taste, all this, perhaps, (I like books where I can forget I'm reading), and had the story gone a better way, I might hardly complain when a dozen, carefully crafted descriptors (yes, I counted) jostle one another in a crowded phrase. Proviso: If a person wants to use every word he's ever heard in one small book, he best tell a very fine tale indeed.)

I think due to the book's curious form, at few points are we able to forget the writer. There is a self–consciousness about the thing. The reader feels he's being told to open wide for yet another spoonful of facts, the writer saying, Now I will summarize the diaries for you. With quotes. Lots of quotes. Now I will draw you a picture of sweet nuns, (with standard issue sky–blue eyes, except for one with eyes the color of a blue Dresden ware). The nuns' most interesting aspect to my mind being height, one 5 foot 10, one 6 foot 2. A reader wants to be too caught up in the story to put the book down to go Google the "average height of German nuns in 1870." On my fifth mid–page Googling I feared Hansen's addiction to detail might well be contagious. Ditto: his use of adjectives, sufficient in profusion to sink the Deutschland on a balmy day.

The strongest writing is in Hansen's telling of the shipwreck itself. It is very well done. But at 212 pages (not counting the appendix, where Hopkins' poem is given, and the note on sources), the book is overlong. It takes the nuns an age to die (well I'm sorry, but it does.). We can be made to weep, and should, at any death, but the life lost matters to the telling. I'm happy to allow a writer as many pages as it takes to make me witness to a life's ending; all I ask is that when he's done, I care more, rather than less, about the loss. Formula won't answer. Not five times in a row.

One feels appropriately churlish quibbling with such a sweetly told tale. This book has more well–intentioned people than I've met in my whole life. The cheerful bunch of monks, whose only sin as far as I can tell is a certain inordinate fondness for punning, are about as lowdown as things get. Here there is smooth, sentimental sweetness, and were the world no more than that, we might be satisfied. The problem is that when we take the measure of the man, we want a fuller story. Hopkins suffers. He really does. We want more than passing reference to his depression, self–denial, disappointment, family schism, especially from a writer who can cause us to develop full–blown chilblains and to shiver at the nuns' wet icy habits clinging to their rasping chests too frozen for death rattles to be heard above the slapping waves. (I am fully capable of being as annoying as the next person.)

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