Sometimes a book appears that makes the expectant reader think, “Finally,” or “Well, it’s about time!” If the book in question is an anthology such as Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, assembled by Luke Hankins, a journal editor and young poet himself, then the reaction may be of a stronger, more satisfying sort, something like “I knew it!” Generally this reaction gives the reader who has it the pleasure of confirmation—the new anthology, then, validates a readerly hunch or hope that a particular poetic or literary movement is indeed afoot, whether it be more recog nizable as a resurgence or as genuine innovation.
The impression that Poems of Devotion gives is neither of these, exactly, but one more like “It’s been here all along.” The “it” there is the particular kind of poetry known as “devotional,” including compositional circumstances and type of phenomenological engagement and divine audience that we associate with the devotional mode. Hankins makes a determined, refreshingly testy attempt to define what devotional poetry is, and what it is not, in an introductory essay here and, to a lesser degree, in an interview with the editor appended to this anthology. If we allow ourselves for the moment to set aside that concern for precision, we can focus instead on this collection’s central accomplish ment: it shows in no uncertain terms that devotional poetry continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and certain lyric poems by E. E. Cummings and Theodore Roethke to poets as various as Geoffrey Hill, Charles Wright, Andrew Hudgins, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Scott Cairns, Mary Karr, Li-young Lee, Carl Phillips, Franz Wright, and, rounding up this “fair school,” Maurice Manning and Christian Wiman. (Hankins’ book includes at least one poem and often two from each of these authors.) Even more exciting, however, is a second impression fully felt only toward the end of the book—that devotional poetry not only abides in the present century but is positively thriving these days, showing promise for the future. Hankins’ greatest service to readers may be his foresight in reaching so deeply into the present moment, concluding Poems of Devotion with a half-dozen poets born in the 1980s, some with first books out and some not yet—and even, in the exceptional case of the final poet featured here, an undergraduate born in 1991.
As for the earliest poets in Poems of Devotion, Hankins’ selections led me to certain reappraising conclusions. First, he chose those “East Coker” and “Little Gidding” sections from Eliot’s Four Quartets that many readers will agree are his most exquisite examples of devotional poetry. Despite Eliot’s ongoing critical trials and debated revaluations, he sounds good here as lead-off writer. Cummings, on the other hand, seems beneath the task of charging a language bent on confronting or describing God; he mainly sounds like a bad, less disciplined and less ear-attentive Hopkins. A cloistered emphasis appears early, in the works of Thomas Merton, Madeline DeFrees, and William Everson (Brother Antoninus), whose outlook combines renunciation of the world with praise of a charged and signifying immediate landscape:
And I lean in the dark, the harsh
Pulsation of night, Big Creek
Gorged in torrent, hearing its logs
Hit those boulders, chute that flood
Batter their weight to the sandbar
And the sea, ripped a channel
Out of the future, the space beyond time,
On the eve of the coming, when Christ,
The principle in the purpose,
Splits the womb in his shudder of birth.
A more common note, and perhaps the one most widespread in this collection, is weariness, a self-awareness on these poets’ part that modernity generally makes the more straightforwardly praising work of divine poetry extremely difficult. R. S. Thomas’ inclusions, taken from his later “via negativa” phase, illustrate this stance; he writes of the world’s “worse darkness / outside, where things pass and / the Lord is in none of them. // I have heard the still, small voice / and it was that of the bacteria / demolishing my cosmos.” Czeslaw Milosz expresses a similar ruefulness but bolder insofar as it is addressed to God himself: “It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously, / of what is, what was, / and what will be.” That surprising inversion of everything we might expect to be the human appraisal of omniscience reminds me of a similarly bold and era-representing stroke in the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos’ Diaries of Exile, in which one Christmas entry asks a single, deflated question: “Was Christ really born in a season like this?” A similar estranged or disenfranchised tone can be heard throughout the century’s devotional poetry, in János Pilinszky, Anthony Hecht, A. R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill, and in two “Vespers” poems here from Louise Glück’s God-haunted collection, The Wild Iris. Miller Williams situates this weariness in a more personal, depressive state, while in Robert Cording’s “Advent Stanzas” the speaker’s hope with no hope of proof feels both anxious and pure:
Here I am again, huddled in hope. For what
Do I wait?—I know you only as something missing,
And loved beyond reason.
That last line, does it sound to you like a celebration of faith’s durability, or a frightening realization?
Of course weariness or spiritual mystification can transmit considerable lyrical power, as in these lines by the Hungarian poet Pilinszky: “Does my complaint reach you? / Is my siege to no purpose? / All around me glitter / reefs of fear.” I must tread carefully with my next statement, for I am a present-day academic in a Midwest suburb, and so more prone to be fretful about the timing of a child’s Saturday-morning soccer match than to be even mindful of an experience like Pilinszky’s surviving in a Hungary under the Axis powers and during the Cold War. By saying this, I mean to acknowledge that I need the witness of these harder devotional poems, Nevertheless, considering the grim, conflicted tone of many of these poems, readers may feel genuinely refreshed by—and have a new gratitude for—the two poems by Richard Wilbur, and those occasionally like them, marked by a spirit of embracing this God-given world. Here, the lyric meditation or encounter seems to fortify the speaker for a deeper life in the world, as if all of us humans at birth took a vow to be alive, serious, and seriously grateful for this place, for all of its miseries and our struggles amid them—or, if it is a vow that has been made for us, it is one that we nevertheless become cheerfully agreeable toward at our better moments. That is the enlightenment that recommits Wilbur’s speakers to the world, rather than detaches them from it. “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” is the more obvious, more familiar example here, but ” ‘A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness’ ” is equally stirring:
O connoisseurs of thirst,
Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink
Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
That shimmer on the brink
Of absence; auras, lustres,
And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.
For a like-minded valuing of this world, or rather a strong evocation of a particular mindset or micro-cosmos within the broader world, see Scott Cairns’ “Theology of Doubt,” a poem for the “slow learner” in each of us, and the selections later in this anthology from Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, whose speaker freely and with admirable liveliness addresses his deity as “boss.”
To be fair, those more predominant tones of strain or wrack or disenchantment accord well with Hankins’ own emphases as presented in his introduction. “Religious” and “devotional” designations, he says, should not describe only poets’ relevant spiritual practices or confessional identities, or be a mere descriptor for the subject matter of religious poems, but instead poetry writing should be seen in itself as a devotional act. This is a key point for the editor, although many devotional poets I know would quickly be accepting of this as, at least, a possibility. Moreover, the purest kind of devotional poet often “gives the reader the sense that he is struggling through the poem itself,” as if, to put it another way, each lyric poem is a threshing floor where doubt and spiritual longing are dramatized and confronted, uniquely and surprisingly. We might think of John Donne here, but Hankins argues that Donne, in a poem such as “Holy Sonnet X” (“Death be not proud”), gives a “record or imitation of prior spiritual devotion … rather than an act of devotion itself.” The reason? The entire poem is really a build-up to its concluding statement, and there is “no uncertainty in the rhetoric.” Despite Donne’s speakers being characterized often as searching, overheated, and even desperate, Hankins presents us with a preferable model in Donne’s near contemporary George Herbert, and particularly the Herbert of “The Search” (quoted here) and “The Collar.” Eliot influentially said that the poems of Herbert’s collection The Temple “form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling,” a statement that could stand as an apt and admirable aesthetics in short form for Hankins’ stricter sense of “devotional poem.”
Later in his introduction, Hankins provides some further examples that bring into sharper focus his editorial parameters for this anthology. W. H. Auden, he explains, is often a religious poet but “very rarely a devotional one,” which is to say he explores theological ideas in his poetry but (in Hankins’ schema) insufficiently reveals a personally invested effort at relating to God. For the Time Being, for example, is “presented from a rhetorical distance.” With this stance in mind, Hankins unsurprisingly treats with both intelligence and enthusiasm the poetry of Franz Wright, whom we might put forward as a high representative of devotional poetry if going by the book’s own coordinates. As Wright says in one interview, “our suffering is the terrible and only teacher,” and, as Hankins nicely puts it in his concluding interview, there must be a “human cost” to entering the “mysterious place of devotion” where this specific kind of poetry resides. I have no doubt that suffering does teach (there is hardly a more central devotional recognition), but I don’t know if every reader will feel like concurring with Wright’s “only” in that above quotation. I also suspect some readers may feel regret at a poet of Auden’s stature being omitted entirely, considering his generally held importance to 20th-century Christian literature. I appreciate, though, how Hankins remains true to his privileged aspects of devotional poetry, and he has every right as editor to demand that poems included in Poems of Devotion strongly reflect his emphases. He offers a preceding “Note on the Selection” to explain and defend his curatorial approach here, offering that any single editor must vitally exhibit “aesthetic vision and discernment.” I have no disagreements there.
That said, it is an occupational hazard of any anthologist to endure the “What about?” carps when the reviews appear, and I would venture a few disappointments of omission beyond Auden’s, who nevertheless is tenaciously present near the end of this collection in Malachi Black’s sections from Quarantine (in clear communication with Auden’s “Horae Canonicae”) and Ashley Anna McHugh, whose poem begins with an epigraph taken from For the Time Being. In the end, Auden comes into focus here as a sacked inspirer. One might also wonder, whence Bonhoeffer, or Donald Davie, or David Ferry, Julia Kasdorf, Jeanne Murray Walker, Sydney Lea, or Kim Johnson? I might also quibble, because that’s what reviewers do, with not generous enough representative poems by R. S. Thomas, John Berryman, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Wright, and Robert Siegel. But this is my anthology, Hankins would rightly respond, and it couldn’t be five hundred pages—enjoy what’s here, or go make your own.
I hasten to say again that there is, indeed, a great plenty to enjoy here. Even if we agreed that the above omissions or certain poem choices were regrettable (and I’d be disappointed, truth be told, if Hankins were willing to agree with me in all cases), I think overall every omission is made up for by two or three really inspired inclusions. Readers will almost surely discover new poets here, from underrated longstanding poets such as M. Vasilis and Judy Little, to fairly well-established figures we just need to read more of, like Richard Jones, Eric Pankey, and C. Dale Young, whose speaker’s bracing confession in “Sepsis” is one of the fiercest utterances collected here. I also love Hankins’ eye-catching decision to include some select songwriters or songwriting poets (Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens—the latter’s lyrics come across strikingly on the page), and the effort to present here devotional expression far beyond the Anglo-Catholic highway of Donne, Herbert, Eliot, et al. Readers will find in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Richard Chess, Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Hirshfield, and Amit Majmudar Jewish, Jewish American, Hindu, Zen Buddhist, and Islamic mystical traditions explored, respectively. On this score, Tarfia Faizullah (born in 1980) is the most exciting young poet represented here, bringing into poems entitled “Acolyte” and “Ramadan Aubade” threads of the early Christian church and Islam and Bollywood in an artful, braided way that makes for thrilling reading.
If Hankins strives to include the world’s four corners here, in terms of religious traditions, he is also keen to be up to the minute. Overall, the last selections in Poems of Devotion make a strong argument for devotional poetry belonging to the young. Ilya Kaminsky’s “Envoi” begins and ends with what we may term devotional poetry’s “sweet spots”—fundamental inquiry and resurgent, clearer-eyed relationship: “What ties me to this earth?” the poem begins, concluding, “Lord, give us what you have already given.” Hannah Faith Notess’ poems and Nate Klug’s poem here make me look forward all the more, as their past writing has done, to their eventual full-length collections. Likewise, Malachi Black, author of two chapbooks, has a full-length book appearing soon with Copper Canyon Press. Hankins includes three sections from his poem “Quarantine.”
Poems of Devotion bears an exciting message, then, and one that any anthology that includes very current work would covet: “Times are good.” Hankins ends his collection on a high note as well, remarking in that concluding interview, “We make because we are made. We are made because God loves to make. We are the result of the pleasurable work of the divine.” That is beautifully said, and for readers who think so, too, they would do well to seek out Hankins’ own collection of poetry, Weak Devotions, recently released. His comment here is beautiful, but that relation Hankins expresses between divine and human makers also begs from us ongoing reflection and an acknowledgment, maybe, of how strange that fact is, that it is so. A line comes to mind from William Stafford’s poem included in the anthology. It is not a comprehensive or conclusive response to Hankins’ observation, but then again, how could there really be one? Instead Stafford does what poets do best—he offers a momentary insight that is streaked with a big-hearted acceptance, come what may, and in that acceptance, one can hear a rather radical belief or hope that the act of writing itself may just be able to reveal, to encounter: “You can’t tell when strange things with meaning / will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down / just the way it was.”
Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first book of poetry, The Garbage Eater, was published in 2011 by Northwestern University Press. A second collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press’s 2011 Open Chapbook Prize, and appeared last year. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Yale Review.
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