Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Varieties of Religious Experience by Christopher Buckley

2014; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2014.0131

1945-8134

Fred Dings,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry W. N. Herbert et al., tr. Bloodaxe Books This collection binds together the many disparate poetic voices of China. Providing a revealing look at a changing culture, Jade Ladder represents a variety of schools of Chinese poetry including Misty, post-Misty, Fourth Generation, and more. This fascinating gathering of new and old voices is sure to please not only fans of Chinese culture but all who appreciate great poetry. Lucy Hughes-Hallett Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War Knopf The controversial and charismatic Italian literary and political figure Gabriele d’Annunzio had a pronounced influence on the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century. He was a prodigious and talented author, playwright, and poet who lived his life as a “nonstop street theater performance.” Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography is a fascinating portrait of a man often regarded as both brilliant and odious. Nota Bene Verse Christopher Buckley. Varieties of Religious Experience. Nacogdoches, Texas. Stephen F. Austin State University Press. 2013. isbn 9781622880171 Like Wordsworth revisiting the Banks oftheWye,ChristopherBuckleyreturns here to the California coast of his childhood . Although the time elapsed is closer to fifty years rather than the five in Wordsworth’s “Lines,” this makes the predicament all the more poignant. Virtually Proustian in their search for lost time, these poems recall an early life spent in Catholic school in the 1950s, immersed in the cultural moment of doo-wop, Brylcreem, American Bandstand , crew cuts, Elvis, and hot-rodders. January–February 2014 • 67 68 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews If this were all, though, the book would be merely nostalgic, but Buckley (again close to Wordsworth) complicates and enriches these memories with the perspectives of a “philosophic mind” brought by the years, of which Wordsworth speaks in his famous ode. A life has been lived in the meantime, and the poet confronts the sea, the vastness of space, the black wall that awaits the end of old age, and his own beginnings. The search, then, becomes less for time lost than for meaning from life lived. “It seems we continue to retrace the footprints / of each grief we left along theshore,neverreallysure/ofourbusiness here beyond the immeasurable / summation of the light where my heart, most of its road work / done, proves useless against the night.” In this passage , we hear uncertainty and despair in the poet’s position. Is there something, then? Anything ? Perhaps, but the varieties of religious experience are not, of course, orthodox. The book signals this at the beginning when it quotes Einstein: “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. . . . This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” In the title poem, toward the end of the book, the poet finds that the “religious” arises perhaps most poignantly when his mother is dying in a hospice and he has to leave “her for an hour or so each day / to feed her lonesome dog, / . . . when one afternoon / a roadrunner appeared / out of thin air, / out of the rocks and cactus, / came up onto the lawn, cocked his head / and looked at me / with the glistening dark star of his eye. / And I went up to him, / bequeathing bits of chicken / I’d cooked for the dog, / and the roadrunner / soon knew me / by my whistle, / by a litany / of little clicks I made / and the sound of the garage door ascending, / and he would wait under the oleander / for my daily offering.” In the desert landscape, kindness flowers, and when it does, the ordinary, the mundane is elevated . Does the poet create or discover the religious, the redemptive, through his acts of kindness toward the lonely, the hungry? “Bequeathing,” “litany,” “ascending,” “offering”—all arise out of “that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love” (Wordsworth, “Lines”). Even a land of rock and cactus can thereby be transformed. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Kristiina Ehin. 1001 Winters. Ilmar Lehtpere, tr. Fayetteville, New York. Bitter Oleander. 2012. isbn 9780978633585 Kristiina Ehin’s voluminous bilingual (the original Estonian and English translation) collection of one hundred poems is permeated with the feeling of a need for closeness with the Other, a...