Reviews

Review: Jane Greer, Love like a Conflagration: Poems

Dappled Things

Jane Greer, Love like a Conflagration: Poems
Pittsburgh, PA:* Lambing Press, 2020, 88pp, $15.95

Review by Timothy Bartel

Love like a Conflagration is a confirmation of a vision forty years in the making. Jane Greer did a daring thing in the early 1980s when she started a literary review, Plains Poetry Journal, dedicated to formal verse. It must have seemed, at that time, as if American poetry had abandoned formal poetry for good. Sylvia Plath’s confessional free verse was ascendant, and even American masters of mid-century formal verse like Robert Lowell and Gwendolyn Brooks had, in their later poetry of the 60s and 70s, embraced free verse to wide acclaim. And yet Greer said no to the strengthening zeitgeist. Her first collection, 1986’s Bathsheba on the Third Day, revealed a poet fiercely assured that the poetic concerns of the present, social, sexual, and religious, could be addressed in traditionally crafted formal verse. In the 90s, Greer’s vision fuelled Annie Finch’s anthology A Formal Feeling Comes, which gathered the best articulations and examples of the New Formalist movement.

With this year’s Love like a Conflagration we see that Greer has more, and dare I say even better, to give us. Just like Bathsheba on the Third Day (which is included at the back of Love is a Conflagration), Greer’s new collection begins with a poem in loose, Sapphic stanzas. Most of Greer’s lines are Sapphic in their syllable count but not in their rhythm. In the first three lines of each stanza, Greer favors the more standard iambic pentameter with an extra unstressed eleventh syllable to Sappho’s Ionic lines with their strange and lovely central choriambic foot (an ancient four syllable foot in which the first and last syllables are stressed and the middle two are unstressed). But Greer retains Sappho’s choriambic rhythm in most of the fourth lines of each stanza. The poem begins as a meditation on glass figurines of angels, but moves to a consideration of true angelic irruption and divine love:

Love like a conflagration shall be yours now
love like an April river, like a tremblor;
love like an avalanche, a midnight bomb-blast,
finding you hidden, (4)

Greer shows off her talent for building energy through anaphora, and weaves spondees (“love like,” “bomb-blast”) into the iambic rhythm, until resolving into the more strictly Sapphic “finding you hidden.” Love here is not comfortable; it is akin to the justice and righteousness of the prophet Amos, all avalanche and rushing river. The final stanza of the poem contrasts this divine love with Christian kitsch art, to devastating effect:

This is your Precious Moment, I its angel,
angry and dark and terrible, God With Us,
Emmanu-el, come bearing yet more mercy,
but you won’t like it. (4)

In the first and last lines of this stanza especially, Greer fits phrases that could feel out of place in serious formal verse (“Precious Moment,” “but you won’t like it”) perfectly into her metrical structure, heightening the bitter irony of her tone. This is a quality that didn’t appear in her first collection, and it is impressive here.

Another very successful instance of this metrically formal usage of colloquial language is in “Unrequited,” in which the speaker addresses a dying Christ:

Love, and count it all as loss
You croak, shattered, from your cross.
This is what you call us to?
We’re just not that into you. (25)

A less confident poet would have used more conventionally poetic language for that final line, but Greer wants to smear our flippancy at divine love in our faces with the most banal of rom-com blather—which is nevertheless precisely metered to match and rhyme with the line before it.

Greer is unsparing in her acerbity against human willingness to devalue God and each other. In “Holy Thursday,” a foot washing service becomes a meditation on Christ’s identity with all humanity:

Christ the young brutes who bully my child,
Christ all those who really mean well
Christ the serial killers and senators
and everyone I’m sure will rot in Hell. (36)

Greer intentionally picks the people the speaker is most disposed to hate and insists that they, too, are loved and to be treated like Christ. The language becomes more blunt and even frantic as the poem draws to a close:

Christ the retard Christ the hippie
Christ the communist Christ the queer
Christ the many who live to annoy me
Christ my sorry face in the mirror. (37)

Greer allows the language to betray the speaker’s unfairness, condemning the speaker by revealing the speaker’s private use of slur words in condemnation of others. But in the final line, the speaker comes to the one person she perhaps is most disposed to find unlovable: herself. And she forces herself, and the reader, to see Christ there as well. Hopkins tells us that “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” Greer shows us what that can look like, in all its messiness.

One of the traditional forms that experienced a resurgence of interest due to the New Formalist movement is the sonnet. And there are a few sonnets in Love Like a Conflagration. Still, Greer’s most powerful shorter poems are often eight to twelve lines long, as if she doesn’t quite need fourteen lines to perform her dense and satisfying maneuvers. This is most evident in one particularly Dickinsonian poem, the eight-line “Saved,” about the passing of a fever:

. . . it listed a moment—left me startled,
with some subtle feelings, oddly bittersweet:
a sense of loss with no remembered having,
of cooling where I hadn’t noticed heat. (31)

Dickinson would have cut many of these lines in half, but Greer lets them stretch into pentameter and even hexameter in the first line. And she allows herself a Dickisonian double analogy in the final two lines, comparing her experience of illness to both loss and having, and cooling and heat. She wants us to not just understand her literal point through an analogy or two, but to meditate and even marvel at the two literal phenomena that form her analogies: loss and cooling are of interest in themselves, and she leaves us in her analogies, caught up in appropriate awe of them, like Dickinson before her.

Possibly, when the future literary histories of the last four decades are written, scholars will aver that the New Formalist movement was neither really new nor notable. After all, they will say, formal poetry hadn’t really gone anywhere: world class poets like Richard Wilbur and Geoffrey Hill were writing robust formal verse the whole time, they will say. And they will be right, in their way. But coming of age as a poet at the turn of the twenty-first century sure did feel, at least to me, like entering an age of free verse, and the work of Jane Greer and Annie Finch did feel countercultural and, perhaps ironically, freeing.

Though I would love to be proven wrong, I fear Love like a Conflagration will not win the Pulitzer for 2020. That prize will likely go, as usual, to a collection of topically relevant and formally vague poems that will be highly praised and quickly forgotten. Greer doesn’t write, I think, to win the lauds of those who love such collections. She writes for those with longer memories and deeper concerns. And in our age of bloated, lax collections clogging the Barnes and Noble shelves, each thin fold of finely crafted verse like Greer’s is a gift—a gift and a challenge.

Timothy E.G. Bartel lives in Houston and teaches writing at The College at Saint Constantine. His poems and essays have appeared in Christianity and Literature, Notes & Queries, and Saint Katherine Review. His recent books include Aflame But Unconsumed: Poems(Kelsay Press, 2019), and Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s Evangeline (Wipf and Stock, 2019).

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of Lambing Press as Seattle; Lambing Press is located in Pittsburgh. We sincerely regret the error.

Book Review: Measuring Time & Other Stories

Dappled Things

Measuring Time & Other Stories by Nathaniel Lee Hansen
Wiseblood Books, 2019; 217 pp., $13.00

Review by Jeffrey Wald

As an attorney, I am constantly aware of the rules and duties surrounding conflicts-of-interest. Accordingly, I now feel an obligation to make this disclaimer: I have a conflict of interest in reviewing Nathaniel Lee Hansen’s first collection of short stories, Measuring Time & Other Stories. This conflict arose the moment I read the title of the first story, “450 Miles to Minot,” and immediately desired to like the collection. For Minot has immense importance in my own history. It is where both my parents grew up on farms in the fifties and sixties It is where I spent almost every holiday of my youth. It was the “big city,” two hours from my hometown, tiny Maddock, North Dakota, and about the only place I ate fast food, walked through a mall, or saw a movie at a theater growing up.

And so as I read on, I found myself cheering for Hannah, the young hero of “450 Miles to Minot,” as she escapes a claustrophobic college relationship in South Dakota. Hannah has been playing house, living with her boyfriend in an old farmhouse while taking eighteen college credits. What began as an exciting and romantic adventure has since grown stale and isolating. So Hannah makes a break for it. Where to? Minot, of course, the “Magic City,” where she used to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins every summer. And just as she formerly delighted in Minot’s fresh air after a stuffy train ride, so she now delights in the freedom of the road and the growing freedom of adulthood (cigarette smoke) mingled with enchanted childhood memories (strawberry soda):

She left the stereo off and rolled down the windows again. She enjoyed the wind whipping into the cab, the way it swirled together the smells of cigarette smoke, strawberry soda, and the vanilla pine-tree air freshener wrapped in plastic, save for its exposed top.

The denouement in “450 Miles to Minot” is understated, the primary action interior rather than exterior, shown and not told. But through this telling we come to see what Hannah sees: that freedom means more than simply doing what you want, more even than doing what your parents do not want. And thus the freedom Hannah experiences in her 450 miles of driving to Minot is a freedom away from the claustrophobia and regret of sin, and toward something good. In this case, toward the Magic City!

Having now read “450 Miles to Minot” and the rest of Hansen’s first collection of short stories, I can say that my desire to enjoy the stories has been satisfied. Part of my appreciation for these stories comes from their sense of place (and not just the place of Minot). Hansen grew up in the small town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, deep in the heart of flyover country, and these stories take place primarily in small towns in Minnesota or South Dakota. Hansen uses his intimate knowledge of rural Midwestern life to beautifully evoke the impression of these places, whether through a teenager running on a flat gravel road while “the broom grass shifted in the drainage ditch,” or by describing the scene after a young man crashes in a ditch: “A half-moon shone on the dashboard and revealed a field off to their left, the not-yet-plowed-corn creating a landscape as on another planet.”

While Hansen’s sense of place gives his stories a deep anchor, it is the people that occupy these places that give them their staying power. Take for instance “The Rez Fairy.” In the story, Alana is an inexperienced children’s counselor attempting to change lives on a South Dakota Native American reservation. But her idealism wanes beneath enormous stacks of bureaucratic paperwork and a massive caseload. On the day of the story’s action, Alana wants nothing more than to speedily finish her last two sessions and get home before dark. On the way to the reservation, she had counted three deer carcasses. (My own father taught shop class on a North Dakota reservation for years, commuting across 30 miles of gravel roads in an enormous 80’s Chevy nicknamed the “Deer Slayer” for running down six deer that barely left a dent in his steel behemoth.) Alana’s last two clients have characteristically run off, allowing her to leave early. On her way home, she comes across John, an elderly Native American, looking for a ride to the casino. Alana agrees to give the ride and then agrees to let John buy her dinner. These gestures appear uncharacteristic of Alana, yet reveal a deep desire: a desire for human connection, for closeness, to give and to receive. Her own young life is filled with professional disappointment and personal loneliness. In paying attention to John, she can perhaps kill two birds with one stone: feel as if she is doing some bit of good and assuage her loneliness. And then, in a moment of O’Connor-esque violence and grace, Alana receives a revelation. She sees one of her clients sitting with his family nearby, throwing a tantrum. She goes over to help, hoping her therapeutic calm will diffuse the situation. Instead, the boy throws a cup of orange soda and ice at Alana, drenching her. Again her ability to make a difference is thwarted. Her optimism is proven false. Does anything she do even matter? But then the second revelation and moment of grace: as Alana informs John she must leave, John offers her his hand. Instead of shaking it, she grabs it and wraps his arm around her and her wet sweater:

Even as its coldness pushed against her, surging more coldness through her limbs, there was the warmth of John’s body. She was trembling, but he held her steady. She thought, here was someone who knew what she was up against, and she knew what they were up against.

Alana’s moment of grace is not proof that she can change the world. She is not guaranteed any earthly success with her sad, broken, neglected clients. But for a brief moment, Alana experiences human connection. Empathy. She is the receiver, not the gift. And that itself is the gift.

Each of Hansen’s stories have these little moments of grace. Whether through a soccer mom finding meaning and purpose in baking cupcakes that end up saving the life of a diabetic old man (“Frost”), or a boy experiencing the thrill of runner’s high and the even greater thrill of a smiling wave from his crush (“Measuring Time”), or a young woman who gives aid and comfort to a teenage girl on the Amtrak who is drunk and vomiting (“On the Hi-Line”), and even through an insecure young professor sharing a moment of connection with an older colleague over (gasp!) a very uncultured Terry Redlin print (“Wildlife”). These moments lead to transcendence through the physical and temporal; in place and time and mediated through people. Theologically speaking, Hansen’s vision is extremely sacramental, where transcendence of the banal and ordinary is always achieved through the immanent—through the banal and ordinary.

Through these unassuming moments of grace, and the corresponding opening of reality that his characters experience, Hansen shows why he is worth reading. For he articulates the complex nature of all human life, even the simplest of lives. The hopes, dreams, loves, griefs, joys, worries, and conquests of his small-town characters are our own. For this reason, I hope this collection will find a large readership both from those of us living in flyover country, and from those in the planes above.

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.

Book Review: Oblations

Dappled Things

Meredith Wise

Oblations
By Nick Ripatrazone
Gold Wake Press, 2011
92 pp.; $14.00
ISBN: 978-0982630969

“All things counter, original, spare, strange.” Oblations begins with an epigraph from “Pied Beauty,” the poem which gave Dappled Things its name. If I had to choose between adjectives, I would say that these Oblations are offerings of the spare. [Read more…]

Book Review: The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke

Dappled Things

The New Iberia Blues by James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster, 2019; 447 pp., $27.99

Review by Jeffrey Wald

According to a 1975 Minnesota Supreme Court case, the “whole purpose of the Juvenile Court Act is to rehabilitate a young person before he or she becomes a menace to society.” A noble goal indeed: certainly there are enough menaces to society lurking about; if we could but intervene and rehabilitate the young urchins before they become full-blown menaces, utopian dreams of progress might finally be realized! But then a hairy question emerges: to what are we rehabilitating these juvenile delinquents? Some prior, pre-aberrant period of life? Or an as-yet-unrealized existence? A state one must progress, or regress, to? To rehabilitate means “to restore to good health or useful life;” and restore in turn means “to bring back into an original condition.” So to rehabilitate is to go back to a prior state, as in, “I broke my ankle, and through strenuous daily rehabilitation, it was restored to good health.” The aim of rehabilitation, then, is to bring that which is harmed, or harmful, or both back to an original condition that consists of a “useful life.”

At the heart of James Lee Burke’s latest piece of fiction, The New Iberia Blues, the twenty-second in his series of Dave Robicheaux books, is a reflection on human nature that stands in stark contrast to the therapeutic rehabilitative goals embodied in the aforementioned Minnesota case.

For Burke, or at least for his detective avatar Robicheaux, there can be no illusion that human nature, in its present configuration, is benign and innately trajected toward a useful life. Rather, something deep down in man is just not quite right. Something inborn is off. The very wiring is on the fritz. Man, as he enters the world, is a menace to society. Not becoming one through ill-fated actions, but already existing in a state of menace that plods ever toward chaos, destruction, and annihilation.

Burke has long been regarded as one of America’s greatest living crime writers, perhaps even as one of its greatest living fiction writers (The Denver Post called him “America’s Best Novelist”). But more recently he has garnered increased notice as an important living Catholic fiction writer. This is notable given that journalist Paul Elie asked just a few years ago in the New York Times, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?”, encouraging readers to “keep looking for literature of belief” and finding it “where you can.” Perhaps detective fiction has not traditionally been a reservoir of Catholic fiction (Chesterton, Sayers, and Greene notwithstanding), but those who seek shall find in Burke a uniquely American, twenty-first century, Catholic voice.

Like the plots of other Robicheaux books (and most crime novels), the plot of The New Iberia Blues centers around a series of murders within Detective Robicheaux’s jurisdiction of New Iberia, Louisiana. In this case, the murders are ritualistic, the first involving a young woman who was crucified and left to drift at sea. Evidence seems to point to the involvement of a group of Hollywood men, the mob, foreign money interests, and a few local street cops. So far, so boilerplate. What is unique about Burke is not necessarily his plots or even his evocation of the evil at work in the world, but rather his ability to portray where that evil comes from: in other words, to articulate something of the nature of evil. For Burke, evil is not simply a manifestation of a mental health condition, or isolated acts from isolated individuals, but is something akin to a living organism. He writes, “Evil has an odor. It’s a presence that consumes its host. We deny it because we don’t have an acceptable explanation for it. It smells like decay inside living tissue.”

And for Robicheaux, evil also is not simply something “out there.” It is continually at work in his own soul, a soul haunted by Vietnam, addiction, and prior questionable acts he committed as a cop. In the depth of the night, “when the booze and weed and pills aren’t working anymore,” Robicheaux understands that “real evil is not simply a product of environmental factors,” but a “worm that lives in the human unconscious.” Perhaps it is a “disembodied presence floating from place to place, seeking to drop its tentacles into whatever host it can find.”

Of course, what Robicheaux describes is a condition known by Christians as the state of original sin: a doctrine which, according to Chesterton, “is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Robicheaux is not only aware of the reality of this doctrine, reminding his daughter that “we pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago,” but also about the ultimate end of evil left unfettered: “I wondered if human nature and our susceptibility to evil would ever change, or if we would continue in our war against the earth until we dissolved all our landmass and our structures and ourselves and returned the planet to the watery blue orb it once was.”

So is Robicheaux’s, and by extension Burke’s, vision ultimately one of doom, desolation, and despair? Not at all. For “where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.” And as with his Southern Catholic predecessors Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, Burke’s bleak realism is the very medium through which divine grace operates: not above the darkness, but in its very midst.

This grace is present in various forms. It appears in a meal shared with his daughter (“I had almost forgotten how wonderful the life of family could be.”) It appears in relief from another dangerous bout with the desire to relapse into addiction:

I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.

It appears in beholding the natural world (the below quoted passage so characteristic of Burke’s writing):

I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mountain floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.

Finally, it appears in a mysterious light (perhaps the same light that blinded Paul?) and a large swell that rocks the boat holding Robicheaux, his kidnapped daughter, and the serial killer Wexler, throwing Wexler off balance. Resolution and rescue come to the protagonists in a moment of violence that makes Mary Grace’s thrown book in O’Connor’s “Revelation” seem tame by comparison.

At the end of Burke’s reflection on the nature of evil, what is one left to believe? Perhaps the Minnesota legislature is naïve, and the dream of returning villains to a prelapsarian state a mere fancy, but does this mean evil has the upper hand? Does original mean perpetual? Or does the light shine in the darkness, with the darkness incapable of overcoming it?

For Robicheaux, clearly evil does not have the final word: “the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.” And as for light, Robicheaux “cannot watch the sun course through the heavens and settle into a molten ball without feeling a weakness in [his] heart, as though God does slay Himself with every leaf that flies.” So in the face of all insistence that God is dead, James Lee Burke continues to insist that it’s because God died and rose again that we have any life at all. And because of that (and his prose, and his narrative, and his moral vision), he is a Catholic novelist worth reading.

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.

Book Review: Reaching Forever: Poems by Philip C. Kolin

Dappled Things

Reaching Forever: Poems by Philip C. Kolin
Cascade Books, 2019; 128 pp., $17.00

Review by David Armand

Philip C. Kolin’s latest collection of poetry, Reaching Forever, takes the reader on a meditative, almost monastic, journey through a Dante-like spiral of earthly and heavenly places—a beach on the Gulf of Mexico during an unseasonable ice storm, an orphanage in 1950s Chicago, a homeless man’s “cardboard manger” in New York, a church in the country, a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro, where catadores search as “Buried relics molt and twist / into rosaries of green rind; thorny / knots and strangling vines wrap / around lampposts doused with darkness.” Yet it is so often, as Kolin reminds us, that it is in these places where one can “hear God’s breathing.”

However, Kolin’s spiritually searching eye consistently goes beyond the obvious imagery and sense of moral didacticism that most readers might associate with this type of poetry. Instead, the poet takes his reader to darker settings, a contemporary Virgil guiding Dante through the circles of Hell and to places that likely would never appear in any watered-down biblical tract. For example, in “A Prisoner of Christ,” the poet takes the reader to a prison in Mississippi, where a monk

[…] was called to be a prisoner of Christ

in a different kind of hermitage

salving souls in cells at Parchman Penitentiary

teaching unschooled monks in striped habits

to sigh the name of Jesus.

And it is this sort of seemingly paradoxical imagery (the idea that Kolin calls the “luminescent dark”) that is threaded throughout the entire collection, suggesting the necessary doubt one must confront before having a true communion with God and the divine. Or as Kolin later puts it, in “Autumnals,” “But uncertainty is also a catechism—”. And like the most sincere seekers, Kolin knows that “Only muddy water can scrub a soul clean.”

To further layer this idea with the type of complexity that a true communion with God requires, Kolin later questions, in “Magdalen Redux,” “But who keeps a garden in a tomb?”

seeming to ask if the earthly work we do, e.g., making poems, creating art, is ever worth the effort in a fallen world. Interestingly, he seems to answer this question in the affirmative, earlier on in the collection, in a poem called “Trees in Late Autumn” when he writes, “But whether they / blossom and bloom, / or stand mute in the cadaver cold, // […]. It’s all sacred forestry.” These poems are sacred, we’re sacred, the world is sacred. Kolin seems to know this, to understand that God knows this, and that it is “through the long night, / God reveals his handwriting.” And if Kolin was ever uncertain of his own faith, these poems seem to suggest he has arrived at a place now—both as a poet and as one of God’s sacred creations—in which “reaching forever” is possible, that there is a place that exists where “you realize you do not / have to wear / your body anymore.” And it is through poetry, making beautiful things, i.e., “reaching,” that one might just be able to achieve this state.

The poems in Reaching Forever are further organized into sections which seem to track the movement of one’s potential ascent into Heaven (or “forever”), thus into knowing, awareness. It opens with a baptism (“Where Water Flows”); then slowly and meditatively descends (“Seasonals”), taking the reader through the darker realms (“Wolves”), only to be purified (“Sheep”), where one must “move uphill / toward the calling wind”; which then takes the reader to the penultimate section, “God’s Voices” and ultimately “Toward Forever,” wherein Kolin closes the collection with a poem that seems to allude to Frost’s “Directive”:

Let your eyes write

new tears for a pilgrimage

to a place you cannot see.

But wait

for the thick darkness.

That is when he will call

for you. Till then

quiver your soul.

Don’t think about

being made in his image.

You will only be looking

into a dark mirror.

In addition to this satisfying structural movement of the collection, allowing it to read like a sort of faith journey, the poems in Reaching Forever are rife with evocative imagery that “makes a joyful noise, rising above / the morning of the dark river”, images that allow the poet (and the reader) to get at what Ezra Pound called the “luminous details” of life, or perhaps even more apropos here, what Hopkins referred to as “dappled things,” “[a]ll things counter, original, spare, strange;” here the reader encounters, for example, “louvered sunlight,” “hair like carpenter’s / shavings,” “wounded / pomegranates,” “rocks / coffined in sludge”, “an apertif of summer’s banquet, / stars and moon lilting across / fields, lawns, hillocks, knolls.” Indeed, Kolin’s is a world where “The moon grows / into a large crystal dial / telling sacred time,” a world where everything is most certainly sacred, but one “whose canvas / must be submerged / to be seen.” This again goes back to the idea of the necessity of descending before one can truly transcend, ascend, or “reach forever,” as the case may be. And Kolin submerges his reader as well, in a baptism of language, breaths of words and images, languorously inhaled and exhaled as one might breathe upon waking from a long, deep sleep. Kolin’s is a layered, nuanced voice, one crying in the wilderness to hopefully save us all, one lost lamb at a time “before the sheep gate / closes.”

David Armand is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also serves as associate editor for Louisiana Literature Press. In 2010, he won the George Garrett Fiction Prize for his first novel, The Pugilist’s Wife, and has since published two more novels, two poetry chapbooks, and a memoir. David has recently finished his fourth novel, The Lord’s Acre, and is currently working on a collection of essays. He has published reviews in New York Journal of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Lit Pub.

“Little Volcanoes”: An Interview with Amy Welborn

Dappled Things

I don’t know how it comes up or how we talk about it in a way that we both understand, but for some reason, I get it in my head that I want her to know something about me. I need to communicate this thing that explains me, that explains us, that explains our presence, how we ended up here out of all the places in the world that we could be tonight. I say what I think might be correct: Mi sposo, morto. She gasps, reaches a hand to touch mine, and I work out a way to tell her more about it.
I point to my heart.

[Read more…]

Book Review: House of Words

Dappled Things

Reviewed by Joseph O’Brien

House of Words
By Jonathan Potter
Korrektiv Press, 2010
94 pp., $15
ISBN: 1439258031

“Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted.” Penned in a letter to her sponsor and editor T.W. Higginson, Emily Dickinson zeroes in here on what the human imagination is about when it sets down to create—although “create” is not quite the word we want in this case. [Read more…]

Book Review: Redeemed

Dappled Things

Katy Carl

Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace that Passes All Understanding
by Heather King
Viking Press, 2008
238 pages, $24.95

After my recent conversation with Heather King, I am again left thinking about what self-gift means for the writer: “You willingly allow yourself to be consumed.” Of course, when King said this, she meant that writing consumes the writer, not that reading does. But “consuming” also connotes nourishment, refreshment. [Read more…]

New Forms, New Popes

Josh Nadeau

Spoiler warning for both The New Pope and 2016’s The Young Pope.
Check out our review of the original series.

Choreographed nuns sway, club-like, in front of a neon cross. John Malkovich positively haunts a British palace (in eyeliner) before donning the garb of Rome’s latest pontiff. An inconvenient cleric falls prey to what no one wants to admit may have been a hit job. Members of a perhaps-obsessive personality cult gather outside the Vatican in matching, vestment-doffing hoodies.

These are just a few of the ingredients thrown into the jarring mix that is The New Pope, an HBO miniseries directed by Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino that finished its run either last month or just the other week, depending on where you live. Over its nine-episode run, it turned out to be an uneven miniseries that explores Vatican power politics with a mix of scandal, sex and jaw-dropping cinematography. The show proves just as concerned with sin and loneliness as with grace and redemption, and for all its flaws raises a unnerving bar for depicting religious institutions on screen.

The miniseries is a direct follow up to 2016’s The Young Pope, which featured a charismatic, deeply conservative pontiff (the startingly human Pius XIII, played by Jude Law) who advocates for an unapologetic return to grandeur and tradition. He falls into a coma by the end of the first series, prompting the election of John Malkovich’s Francis II by the third episode of The New Pope.

Much of the plot (though, with Sorrentino, plot should never be mistaken for the main course) revolves around Francis II’s dedication to the ‘middle way,’ a moderate corrective to the flashier policies of Pius XIII – a corrective that various characters embrace or struggle against. The series, however, is anything but moderate. Its themes (and characters) embrace dramatic highs and lows, as does the show’s quality. Which makes for a mixed viewing experience, but there are more than enough solid moments sprinkled among the disappointing ones to keep one watching. That is, if problematic, art-house Vatican dramas are your thing.

Sitting in tension

One of the biggest things that feels new, at least in 2020, is the show’s refusal to ignore the fact that the Vatican is the epicenter of a) a recent, gut-churning scandal and b) an undismissable, two-thousand-year history of tradition, innovation, pain, exhilaration, substance, sacrifice, betrayal, oppression (on both sides of the giving/taking line) and some of Europe’s finest art. It may help that the show’s atmosphere is bewildering, dreamlike – a perfect soil on which to refuse to polarize or take sides.

And taking sides is all too easy, especially when confronted with narratives that, at least in our divided culture, seem bent on not allowing any other interpretation into the room. And most popular, Vatican-themed art falls into this very trap. On the one hand you get overly-hygienic portrayals of the Vatican as the heart of everything pure in the world (nearly every major devotional papal drama), or on the other you get one-sided (though necessary) dramas like Spotlight or exploitive soft-porn à la The Borgias.

The tension between these two poles often proves too strong to resist. But that’s precisely what The New Pope, for all its flaws, does. It recognizes that the subject matter may invite a joke or two but never reduces the Church to a punchline. It acknowledges the doctrinal issues that are out of step with the liberal West without falling into the trope of “sensitive leader throws all to the wind and embraces change.” It talks about sin without reducing a dynamic, breathing, suffering institution to the sins of its members. Sorrentino does land more than a few cheap shots, sure, but just as often he refuses the easy way out.

The show’s comfort with this tension proves thrilling all the way through. There’s something dynamic, even fresh, in being willing to sit so near an open wound. The miniseries does tend to wallow, but I never felt bored when it wallowed through these paradoxes. There’s never a pressure to rush towards a comfortable resolution – in fact, resolution’s often denied in favour of being present to the characters and their crises. This might prove frustrating to those who expect a more conventional TV experience, one that opts for tying loose ends and such, but for me this is one of the show’s greatest strengths. Like the 2017’s Twin Peaks revival, The New Pope is small-screen art-house writ large.

It has to be said, though, that for all the miniseries’ innovative bits there’s a feeling that Sorrentino doesn’t understand his subject enough. Before you go off and stream the show, be warned: for every electrifying moment there’s another around the corner that invites pure facepalm. And the culprit is familiar indeed.

Yes, Sorrentino, religious literacy really is a thing

Religious literacy, or rather illiteracy, is the show’s biggest disappointment and may prove harder for believers to swallow than the awkward homilies, ecclesial posturing or the number of breasts on display (the oogle-factor is indeed high and off-putting). For all The New Pope’s interest in the trappings and emotional legacy of Roman Catholicism, the show proves deeply ambivalent about its moral and philosophical underpinnings.

In many ways the same could be said of Netflix’s recent, Oscar-nominated The Two Popes. Both feature long conversations where high-ranking magisterial figures lack a basic grasp of Christian theology, or even history. Yes, both films dive fearlessly into, and struggle with, the thornier issues that more conventional Catholic dramas tend to gloss over. And yes, their directors come from traditionally Catholic societies and bring an aesthetic to bear that’s rarely seen in religious films. But the absence of even seventh-grade catechesis is cringeworthy.

In The New Pope, the lazy moments feel more gratuitous. The struggle between virtue and vice is often swapped out for one between repression and self-actualization, replacing the narrative of the cross with that of the Enlightenment. And the ability to experience pleasure seems to be Sorrentino’s primary indicator for said self-actualization, which partly explains why the camera often skips with glee over art, architecture and women’s bodies. It’s a forced dichotomy that ignores much of what the institution actually stands for and struggles to embody.

This is the kind of show that’s easy to make when showrunners are confronted by a world they don’t entirely understand. As in, The New Pope, for all its innovations, is still an attempt within a secular, liberal-leaning context to make sense of Catholicism. Or to make Catholicism relevant by transplanting it into a philosophically foreign ecosystem.

This leads to major distortions, which can be distressing for people of faith. It can evoke legitimate feelings of distaste, defensiveness or offense over how the artists, at best, didn’t do their homework or, at worst, didn’t think any homework was necessary. What we’re looking at here is a work of art about religion where the core tenets of that religion are conspicuously absent. Which means the members of a given community remain misrepresented.

In certain circles, talking about cultural appropriation (as a concept) often generates resistance – some wonder just what the problem is with engaging with or reusing elements of a different culture. But this misunderstands the idea: cultural appropriation happens when a group, one that has a certain element of power, systematically uses or represents elements of another culture in ways that are problematic, hurtful or damaging.

This is essentially the major issue with The New Pope: it’s obsessed with the history, costumes and drama of the papacy but, like many other shows and films before it, it proves too easy to appropriate them to tell a story that marginalizes the experiences of actual clergy and lay Catholics. In this sense, if we ask “what’s new about The New Pope?” the answer would be “not much.” Yet another story about Catholics with too little Catholicism involved.

Which adds up to a frustrating experience. Sorrentino’s ability to explore contemporary tensions in the Vatican is painfully fresh, maybe even necessary in a way we still need to unpack – but all the same he swings wildly off-mark when it comes to Catholicism as spirituality, metaphysics and a way of life. So where does that leave Catholic viewers?

Moving forward, if that’s what we want

When it comes to what you’re willing to tolerate in art, everyone’s got a different threshold. For some, The New Pope goes too far. For others, not far enough. No matter where your feelings are along that spectrum, they’re legit – no one’s obliged to swallow the dish Sorrentino’s prepared.

What we’re looking at here is an in-between point, a stillborn prophecy that isn’t able to live up to its own promise – yet. Everything about it that’s momentous comes with the whiff of something stale or even exhausting. That’s the tension we’re left with.

While I’m sure others might disagree, I have a feeling that if we want to get through to the other side, to a place where we see more art that engages wholeheartedly with the deep realities of religious, clerical and institutional lives, we need to process and imbibe just what The New Pope does right. Even if that means rubbing up against what it does wrong. That doesn’t mean legitimizing its flaws or pretending they don’t matter, but it does call for rigorous, generous engagement.

I think what I want to say is that I’m not entirely sure if The New and Young Pope are good. What I’m sure of, though, is that they’re important, maybe even precious. And one of the biggest reasons why is that they find new ways, new forms of presenting clergy, institutions, traditions – ways that transcend the polarizing rhetoric, ways that make conservatives out to be something more than crazy, wounded or intellectually malnourished. Sorrentino’s antiheroes are flawed, sympathetic, sometimes badass.

Kiss it.

The sheer artistry in the cinematography makes St. Peter’s Basilica seem young again. The acting gives depth to figures that are simplified even in the religious media. Spiritual leaders, often publicly reduced to hypocrites or saints, are allowed moments of confusion, mischief, depression and surprise. There’s a palpable feeling of helplessness and horror over the crises this papacy’s inherited. Everywhere there’s an atmosphere of vitality, matched by loss. There’s the creeping sense that being surrounded by even this much beauty won’t insulate one from disappointment, indifference or aging. Sorrentino’s curia are clever, deflated, inventive and lonely. Genuine delight feels possible again because there’s no guarantee it will come at all.

For me, the show’s desire to humanize such a strange, even threatening (at least to secular liberal tastes) world is an unexpectedly powerful, not to mention encouragingly positive, cultural sign.

Much is made of how North America and Western Europe are becoming increasingly polarized – culturally, politically, spiritually. In this kind of environment, support structures break down, communication becomes difficult and defense grows more important than reaching out. Cultures, institutions or persons that are classified as an ‘other’ and seen as too threatening to even touch.

And the papacy is threatening. Its positions diverge strongly from the contemporary liberal consensus, and it has influence across the planet. Some describe it as an institution that has to be overcome in order to make a better world. None of that’s softened in The New Pope and this is part of what makes it so thrilling.

Because even with the absurdity and the teenage drama and the occasionally hollow pontificating, this’s still an attempt to bring together voices that are usually sealed off in separate echo chambers. And while we may complain (rightly) about the show’s fuzzy ideas, its focus on the relationships between otherwise controversial figures may be what allows The New Pope to transcend our noisy culture war and become a point of genuine connection between the trenches. Priests, nuns, cardinals and even popes are given space on screen to be human without being forced to deny why they are or what they stand for. That doesn’t happen every day.

This isn’t the show we need, but it’s a frighteningly encouraging sign that we’re on the way there. And in spite of being repulsed by parts of Sorrentino’s vision, maybe we’ll get there faster by learning from it.

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The New and Young Pope aren’t the only examples of recent shows or films that offer flawed, complex depictions of the clergy. Stay tuned for part two in this series, where we’ll be exploring one of 2019’s most critically lauded comedies.

An abridged version of this article appeared in Convivium Magazine.

Josh Nadeau is based in Russia and, when not writing or teaching, may be found winter cycling, hitchhiking or engaged in general shenanigans. He hopes, when he’s older, to maintain a sense of awe.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life

Meredith McCann

Reviewed by Meredith Wise

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life
By Paul Mariani
Viking, 2008
496 pages, $34.95

“To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life”: in this line, Hopkins could have been speaking of the treatment he has received from his biographers. Two full-length lives have already been published, and both, while impeccably researched, fail to credit the reality of Hopkins’ spiritual life. [Read more…]