Timepiece

Christian Century, Oct 21, 1998 by Kathleen Norris

Timepiece. By Jane Flanders. Poetry Service, 72 pp., $19.95; University of Pittsburgh Press, 58 pp., $10.95 paperback.

I have long been an evangelist for poetry, a word which seems to engender as much cheer in the average American as the word "Calvinism." I am not easily discouraged, and in most of my speaking engagements manage to sneak in a poem or two, by myself and other contemporary poets, to demonstrate that listening to poetry can be enjoyable as well as illuminating.

In tact, as an oral art, poetry is far more compelling than prose, something that is reconfirmed to me every time I begin to read a poem in the middle of a sermon and observe people sitting up straighter and listening more attentively, as if I'm reading again from the Bible. It seems to me that at its best poetry does inspire the heart in a way that is similar to scripture. Like scripture, a fully realized poem is not mired in the surfaces of things but has immediate access to our inner being.

When I am subverting Christian audiences with contemporary poetry, I frequently use poems that are inspired by the Bible, such as Li-Young Lee's "The City in Which I Love You," from a book of the same name. The poem imagines the narrator of the Song of Solomon as an immigrant in a contemporary city, seeking his beloved while passing "two men jackeling a third in some alley / weirdly lit by a couch on fire." Lee, a refugee from Indonesia, might be speaking for any Christian when he refers to this unnamed city as the "city I call home, in which I am a guest."

I like to prove to ignorant or skeptical audiences--and when it comes to contemporary poetry, many Americans are both--that much good biblical interpretation is to be found in slim volumes of poetry from university presses. Jane Flanders's Timepiece, for example, includes the poem "Spit," a retelling of the miracle in Mark 8:22-26, from the point of view of the blind man who is healed. When asked why he didn't simply strike the stranger's hands away, he replies, "I was remembering how, when I was small, my mother spit on the hem of her skirt / and wiped my dirty face."

In recent years Oxford University Press has provided several anthologies that should help enormously to inform Christians about poetry on biblical themes. One is a two-volume set edited by Robert Atwan and Laurence Wieder titled Chapters into Verse, which matches each book of the Bible to a selection of poems based on it. In taking from the storehouse of literature both the old and the new, the editors have made an anthology that is exceptionally wide-ranging and instructive.

The chapter on Job is typical, including poems by Hart Crane, George Herbert, Lord Byron, Herman Melville, Jones Very and the contemporary poets Elizabeth Sewell, W. S. Merwin and John Ashberry (on Job as a beleaguered office worker with boils). Theodore Roethke's powerful "Judge Not" makes a good companion to any reading of Matthew 7:2. The book is full of surprises: while we might expect that John Donne and Emily Dickinson were inspired by the Gospels, we're delighted to see connections made between scripture and the work of Allen Ginsberg or James Dickey.

Another Oxford volume, edited by Atwan, George Dardess and Peggy Rosenthal, is Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry. It truly is a world collection, including poems from Africa, Asia and South America as well as from the European and American traditions. As with Chapters into Verse, Bible texts are provided alongside the poems, and again the juxtaposition of contemporary writers with ancient ones gives the book a deliciously heady feel. On the incarnation, St. John of the Cross is paired with R. S. Thomas; on the annunciation, Hildegard of Bingen precedes Primo Levi.

At a time when the word "diversity" is overused to a dangerous degree--it is how words become meaningless--the sheer diversity in this book is inspiring. The postresurrection appearances of Jesus as depicted in Luke and John, for example, are illuminated by a little-known Dutch medieval nun, Sister Bertken, as well as by Thomas Aquinas. From the European-Anglo tradition comes work by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Markham. Among the contemporaries are Hae-In Lee, Kostas Varnalis, Ole Wivel, X. J. Kennedy, Jane Kenyon and Chinua Achebe. This is not diversity for diversity's sake, but rather for the sake of demonstrating the Bible's ability to reach people in any age and culture.

The Gospels in Our Image, edited by economist David Curzon, is another volume devoted exclusively to 20th-century poetry. Bible verses and informative notes on the poems are included. This anthology is not quite as global in scope as is Divine Inspiration, but the range is still exceptional. The section on the Sermon on the Mount, for example, contains versions of the Lord's Prayer by D. H. Lawrence, Jacques Prevert and Nicanor Parra. Cesar Vallejo offers a poem on "Our Daily Bread," and Antonio Machado a meditation on the words "thy will be done," which begins with a piercing cry: "Lord, you have ripped away from me what I loved most."