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God’s Design
Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry
Edited by David Craig and Janet McCann
Selected contributors include: Denise Levertov, Les Murray, Annie Dillard, Robert Fitzgerald, Paul Mariani, Dana Gioia, Bruce Bond, Pope John Paul II, Thomas Merton, and fifty-five other poets.
Story Line Press, 2000. 320 pages.
Reviewed by Kathleen L. Housley
Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry is a rich and generous anthology, with 122 poems from 63 poets, some well-known and others talented newcomers. While most are American, there are just enough poets from other countries to provide the book an international flavor. The editors have also reached back in time, including poems by Gabriele Mistral, who won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1945, and Claude McKay, a respected African-American poet who converted to Catholicism just before his death in 1948.
The title of the anthology is taken from a poem by Karol Wojtyla, the man who became Pope John Paul II, whose work opens the book:
Oh, how you are bound, place of my passage
with the place of my birth.
God’s design rests on the faces of passersby,
its depth following the course of ordinary days.
The pope sees passage as a “sliding into death,” yet it is a hopeful movement. In “Hope Reaching Beyond the Limit,” he writes:
No layer of my memory alone
confirms my hope,
no mirror of passage recreates my hope,
only Your paschal Passage,
welded to the deepest record of my being.
In Wojtyla’s poetry, the theme of the anthology rings clear, for a persistent hopefulness sounds in many of the poems that follow.
As I read through the book, I put a plus sign by every poem I considered good, and a check mark by every poem I considered mediocre. By the end there were far more plus signs than checks. And within the plus category, there were some poems so beautiful I intend to memorize them so that I can call them to mind when the printed word is not available.
In this category are some of the poems by Paul Mariani, each a little story about the recognition of grace within sorrow and failure. His poems feel open and truthful. “Then Sings My Soul” recounts the time on a men’s retreat when a close friend announced he was dying. In singing the chorus of the hymn (after which the poem is named), the speaker struggles to align his friend’s pain with his own fear of death while trying to understand the goodness of God. In another poem, a man tells of his anger at God after his wife has had a series of miscarriages, and the eventual benediction that descends on their lives.
Fr. David May’s two prayer poems also struggle with human shortcomings in a way that is ultimately hopeful. In “English Night,” his opening language is spare and powerful, evocative of John Donne’s:
No more resolutions, Lord,
No long-term plans, or visions
Of what might be--
These only come between us.
No offering you my heart now,
You’ve shown me what it is--
Wastrel seeking waste,
Selling itself to any bidder
Offering comfort’s moment.
Likewise, May’s “Prelude to Holy Week” deals with the theme of failure, beginning with the poem itself in which “flawed / rhyme schemes fail and iambs crumble / Into sultry silence,” and proceeding to the speaker who is “like a bird driven crazy by contrary winds, / Flying back and forth between lost worlds.” Yet the poem ends in both praise and supplication: “Hosanna. Make a kingdom of this dust.”
There are several hard-hitting poems about injustice. For example, in “Labor Day This Hundred Years,” Robert Knoepfle takes on “banditos in the boardrooms” who dream of “golden parachutes” while miners are laid off. Another group of poems deals with the culture of Catholicism -- the mottled green halls of a parochial school, a holy card tucked into a missal, and well-thumbed rosaries. However, being Catholic is not a requirement for readers of this anthology. Many of the poems rise above the particulars into a wider meaning that is available to all.
The editors have arranged the poems in accordance with the liturgical calendar and the feast days of several saints. Sometimes this organizational approach provides a key to the meaning of a poem, but at other times it feels arbitrary, as if the editors, at a loss as to where to place a poem, had forced it into a liturgical category. For example, while I liked William Baer’s poem “Magnum XL-200,” about a man who rides roller coasters to distract his mind from his job and family even though he has a heart condition that precludes such activities, I could not see its connection to Lent, the section in which it was placed. Other poems are larger than their assigned spot. Frank Stewart’s masterly series of poems, “A Guide to Musical Styles,” with its theme of the interconnection between sacred melody and the sounds of nature, is appropriately placed within the St. Cecelia section, but could just as well have been placed anywhere.
More times than I care to admit -- often when I have been rushed and preoccupied -- I have read a poem (or a passage of scripture, for that matter) and gotten nothing from it; no illuminating spark rose up from the page and ignited my mental kindling. I was not able to discern its meaning, let alone be touched by its beauty. Yet on another day, perhaps in the quiet of early morning with a cup of black coffee at hand, I have read the same poem or scripture and been startled by its translucent depth. I have read the poems in this anthology both ways. When, on a first reading, I have missed a poem’s meaning, I have waited until another day and reread it. Good poetry not only takes time to write -- it takes time to read. Place of Passage should be read slowly and repeatedly. It is worth the effort.
Kathleen L. Housley has written poetry and articles for numerous journals including Woman’s Art Journal, New England Quarterly,The Christian Century, and Image. An Affiliated Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, her area of concentration is the interconnection of religion and American culture. Housley’s first book, The Letter Kills But the Spirit Gives Life, explores the lives of five nineteenth-century suffragists, one of whom translated the Bible and had it printed by Mark Twain’s publishing company as part of her battle to prove the intellectual capability of women. Housley’s most recent book, Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp, is available from University Press of New England. Tremaine, a famous art patron, was a Christian Scientist whose interest in abstraction was based on her belief in non-duality.
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