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."

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.

These criticisms aside, Beasley is an extremely able poet, as is made clear in a narrative poem, "The White Children of Macon," about a particularly twisted first-grade teacher. Also, his formal innovations can be thought-provoking, as in a "Mutating Villanelle" on cloning. And he offers surprising, meditative lines that linger in the mind long after the book is closed: "In my Father's house, so many closed-up rooms." As such, Beasley strips away the niceties of religious verse to examine Christianity in a challenging and often deeply spiritual manner.

Lise Goett's Waiting for the Paraclete does not attempt many formal innovations, but her book certainly bends imagery to its breaking point. Goett writes poems to scratch your head by, with lines such as "the loins' pallor and flame mute as doves / under ice." Perhaps the strongest and most challenging writer among those reviewed here, she can sear the page, as in her description of suicide, "that alpine lake that glimmers / in the reptile brain" or in the line "Look up. Your life is suddenly ending—."

In her images, the Bible is a frequent reference point: "then in the morning we'll arise, we'll begin, / stick by stick as we always do, to build our Babel again," and "Ever since Adam, ours has been a race sentenced / to drink a draft to be made much of and let go." She focuses especially on the desire for completion, to be "galvanized by the body's own lightning, / clairvoyant as stone." In the poem "Conversion," she describes the morbid attraction of her girlhood friends to a young man whose eye was pulled out in a fishing accident. At night, the girls "prayed to a god with a foraging heart" and

thinking how grace must enter the body like this
as we slipped out under the nameless bowl of stars
to feel the hunger of our own darkness:
the sweep and whisper of the line,
the suck and gape of the eyeless socket,
the god who reels us in.

While looking for galvanizing grace, Goett dismisses "god" and also the Church. In one poem, for example, she describes Paris' Notre Dame cathedral, "buttressed for renovation like the sagging rites of this religion."

If institutional religion does not spell relief, where's the Paraclete? In her poem "Where Earth, This Fire" (first published under the title "Waiting for the Paraclete"), Goett writes of those who await "the final election by fire" and stare "into the omega / of not-being." She ends by presenting three "theories / of transformation": suicide, masturbation, and "the advice to the Jews: / go home / and wait, / close your doors, / this pain will pass over." Apart from sexual pleasure, she seems to suggest the only real comfort in life is the simple acceptance of death. In bringing such a message, she uses the Bible as a poetical cash machine, from which the poet withdraws images at her own will.

From a religious perspective, maybe these five collections merely underscore that you cannot always judge a poetry book by its title. And it is perhaps not surprising that, even in religious dress, contemporary poetry tilts, or most often bows down, to the delights of a well-wrought image. As a genre, poetry seems better equipped to raise a question as vividly as possible than to reply with a solid and set, catachetical answer.

When I finished rereading all the books, however, I couldn't help but wish that religious poetry could find more often a balance between questioning and confessing, between artistic creed and Christ. Perhaps the challenge is to seek out as well as to create poetry that combines the merits of these books, expressing doubt and faith through vivid imagery, limpid lines, and formal variety, all tied by a constant play of wit and seriousness.

Otto Selles is professor of French at Calvin College and the author most recently of New Songs, a collection of poems.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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