If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the
English language, by two main streams, the devotional tradition,
leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the
contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William
Blake, it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry
belongs. In the poems of God's Loud Hand, Cherry conducts, often
not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the
emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry
(""Lord save me,"" ""Lord forgive me,"" ""Lord help me""), a
metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are
fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are
more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr,
perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a
willingness to ask Abraham's great question, ""Shall not the Judge
of all the earth judge wisely?"" This intellectual boldness reveals
itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like
Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points
logically, no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of
such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift
the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind
of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks, an exaltation of
larks, as they say, that rise each morning to heaven's gate, but
instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy's own music. And in
what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods.
From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama,
through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through
the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the
orchestral outburst of the final group of poems, poetry celebrating
its own freedom ot be poetry, in all these parts (""a chorus of
lyrics,"" one might say) there is a symphonic unity that
astonishes, an ode to joy.
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