Paul Mariani is a haunted man. Perhaps we are all haunted, but what is impressive about Mariani is his willingness to admit it, his openness about the ghosts in his life. Take for example the preface to his brilliant biography of John Berryman, Dream Song, in which he describes a shadowy figure who emerges from the Freudian/Dantean realm he calls "the dark underworld of the imagination" to pursue Mariani and impress upon him the obligation to write the book. Such frankness about one's ghosts, such willingness to break the academic posture of objectivity, is rare enough to be precious to any reader, and the value of this frankness is in the resulting clear view of the most troubling thing about ghosts: they always have a claim on us. They speak to us of commitments that go deeper than the commitments of our own making. It is perhaps, then, their proximity to us rather than alienation from us that makes ghosts so frightening. In Epitaphs for the Journey—Mariani's recent volume of "New, Selected, and Revised Poems," with illustrations by Barry Moser—his ghosts are on display in poems that are both intimate and learned, that time and again circle poetically around the deep claims laid on the poet's soul by the ghosts of time past.

Like Berryman, and like so many of us, Mariani is haunted by the ghost of his father, whom he addresses directly in "Crossing Cocytus" a poem that is clearly an attempt to put the old man to rest. The word "father" appears in no less than six titles of poems selected for the volume, and the very first poem in Epitaphs for the Journey, "Mairzy Doats," calls up the ghost of the poet's fathering, summoning the "Recording Angel" to "Rewind" the tape of Mariani's life to a moment when he was a small boy, sitting in the backseat while his father and his father's brother conversed up front in the strange dialect of adults, mixed in the child's mind with the nonsense coming from the radio. He is, however, unable to remain in that backseat for long; "the flecked film / frozen in blacks and whites and sepias, like some / Roman ruin crumbling on a darkling plain" breaks up, and the poet is propelled back into the present, dragging with him two ghosts: "these two who follow me / everywhere I go." The follower, the child in the backseat yearning for adult understanding, has become the followed, pursued by ghosts who make claims upon the present—who demand, in Mariani's own words, "to be fed," their food the attention of the living. In Hamlet, "Remember me" is, after all, the chief demand that the old ghost makes upon the young prince of Denmark.

Mariani is haunted as well by the ghosts of former selves, the shades of lives he lived before. In poems that make moving meditations out of the fragmented memory of early youth, Mariani holds a séance to summon the ghosts of his own childhood self. We might ask, if the claim of dead fathers is to our attention, then what claim do these dead selves of childhood have on us? Perhaps it is the claim to explanation, the demand that we make right the confusion of youth by sifting and sorting things from the vantage point of the present. If so, it is a claim the poet can never quite make good on, for to explain the past, he must imaginatively enter into it, losing the clarity of the present, allowing himself to be possessed by the specter of the earlier self.

One fine example is "The Furnace: July 1945," which begins with the confusion of a child who wakes in the night to a malfunctioning furnace shaking the floor "until the bed itself begins to tremble" (an image anyone who has seen The Exorcist might be prone to associate with a kind of haunting) and ends in the deeper, unresolved confusion of a child looking up at a sky full of bombers on their way to Europe or Japan, a child who turns to his military father for answers but is left unable to fully comprehend the meaning of seeing "the heavens darkened with those / avenging angels he kept telling me were friends." Other poems look at later stages of adolescence, such as sexual awakening and first jobs, but still give the sense of an earlier self that haunts the present demanding an explanation. Many of Mariani's best reflections on childhood and young adulthood remind us that if, as Wordsworth would have it, "the child is father to the man," then this ghostly father, too, cries out "remember me."

As the book progresses, the nature of the ghosts shift in ways appropriate with age. Many poems focus on his children, because, though we usually associate ghosts with the past, to be a father is to be haunted by the future. We see also many poems in which Mariani is haunted by his literary predecessors—Berryman, W. C. Williams, Hopkins, Dante—as one might expect a prominent biographer, critic, and poet to be. One might, in a less strident version of the "anxiety of influence," posit that these poets, along with the several intellectual mentors evoked elsewhere in the book, are father figures, rehearsing their own claims on their poet descendent. But the most prominent father in Epitaphs for the Journey is God the Father, because most of all Mariani is God-haunted. Mariani's poems are never abstractly theological; rather, they offer glimpses of God between the cracks of regular human life. His straightforward delivery—generally, though not always, in plain-style free verse—helps to cement this sense of the ordinary. But in Mariani's best poems, the sacred, the ineffable, comes slipping in, haunting the world of regular life.

No poem better illustrates Mariani's God-haunted sensibility than the powerful and masterfully structured "Quid Pro Quo." It begins with an account of the poet's wife in the hospital again after the second of two miscarriages in four months. Asked by a colleague what he thinks of God now, Mariani offers "a variant / on Vanni Fucci's figs" by "raising [his] middle finger up to heaven, quid / pro quo." But God does not, it seems, take the hint, and he continues to haunt Mariani, following the young couple the summer after to a "cedar-scented cabin off Lake George" where they apparently conceive a son, "a little Buddha-bellied / rumplestiltskin runt of a man who burned / to face the sun." As this sweeping poem moves toward its conclusion, we learn that this gift of a child grows up to become a priest, prompting the poet to ask, "How does one bargain / with a god like this, who, quid pro quo, ups / the ante each time He answers one sign with another?" This ghostly father is as unshakable as he is unpredictable.

In critical works like God and the Imagination, in biographies ranging in subject from Williams to Berryman to Hart Crane to Hopkins, in six previous volumes of poetry, Mariani's contribution to the Christian literary community and to the broader sphere of American letters has been significant. Epitaphs for the Journey provides a much-needed look back over his poems from the last 34 years, offering the reader a fine array of heartfelt and haunted lyrics prompting us to think about the demands our ghosts make upon us. In the midst of an increasingly consumer-oriented culture that would do away with ghosts by reducing all time to the eternal present of the purchase, may we all be as richly, blessedly haunted as Paul Mariani.

Benjamin Myers is Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature at Oklahoma Baptist University. His second book of poems, Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books), was published last year.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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