Religious Allusion In The Poetry Of Gwendolyn Brooks

This book examines how Gwendolyn Brooks, a self-proclaimed nonreligious person, advocates adherence to Christian ideals through religious allusions in her poetry. The discussion integrates Brooks' words, biographical data, commentary by other scholars, scriptural references, and doctrinal tenets. It identifies biblical figures and events and highlights Brooks' effective use of the sermon genre, and her express parallels between Christianity and Democracy. The work opens with a biographical chapter and Brooks' comments on religion, followed by analyses of her long poems, and more than thirty of her short ones. An illuminating interview with Nora Brooks Blakely about Brooks' religious background and philosophy is included.

With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message. Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.

This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.

THE HUM OF IT ALL (A KIRKUS REVIEW) Poems from a Personal Journey Eugene C. Bianchi Parson's Porch Books (106 pp.) $16.95 paperback ISBN: 978-1-946478-15-3; March 24, 2017 A poet muses on faith, peace, and the ties that bind in this accomplished collection. It is fitting that Bianchi (The Bishop of San Francisco, 2005) should borrow his book's epigraph from T.S. Eliot, who worked out some of his finer religious feelings in verse, as Bianchi devotes many of the poems in his collection to reflections on spirituality. He's also a professor emeritus of religion at Emory University, so his explorations are both erudite and wide-ranging. For instance, "The Sacred Lives Quiet in the Ordinary" grows from a reference to the monk St. Ignatius: "In 1540 the Jesuits started by revising / monastic ways without losing their core. / Ignatius said: our manner is ordinary- / immersed in the fabric of everyday life, / to find the divine in all things." In the last two lines, Bianchi establishes a tactful equilibrium between the "everyday" and the "divine," and the supposed tension between them (which is really no tension) drives the rest of the poem. "An Inward Olympics," by contrast, begins with a quote from Rumi, the Muslim mystic who sought unity with the Godhead; it culminates with a moving image of ecumenism: "Suddenly it happens, a peaceable kingdom, / all seekers eating and drinking from the source /..../ In silent unity, spirit moves in and out, / And draws me smiling into the stream of now." There's a powerful immediacy to the poet's language here, strung between two phrases-"suddenly it happens" and "the stream of now"-that nudge readers into the present moment. References to Rumi, Ignatius, and other religious luminaries would seem to work at cross purposes; after all, how could followers of Jesus and Muhammad come together in a "peaceable kingdom"? But for Bianchi, such differences ultimately resolve into similarity, and the "Hum" of the book's title is a metaphor for a "unifying process," a "concert in the cosmic music hall." Bianchi's poetry is conversational without ever lapsing into the colloquial, and in his lessons on religion, the former professor educates without seeming didactic-no small feat for an academic. A sensitive volume in which art and religion merge.