God's Loud Hand: Poems - Hardcover

Cherry, Kelly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807118206 ISBN 13: 9780807118207

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1993

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Kelly Cherry is the author of over twenty-five books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, ten chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She and her husband live in Virginia.

From Publishers Weekly:

A multifaceted writer, Cherry ( My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers ) is difficult to classify. Her fiction is better written than her poetry, yet her poems in this collection have a lyrical rather than a narrative base. Despite the fact that Cherry speaks constantly of God and has a number of poems built around the life of Christ, her understanding of a higher power seems predominantly earth-bound: "At night, God and I slept on our grassy beds, / He in one hut, and I in another." As in the Song of Songs, the lover addressed in these poems is at once mundane and divine. In short, there's nothing surprising in the poet's perceptions. Reading through the volume, one rushes toward the secular poems which fill the second half, only to discover these are even more cliched and intrusively rhymed: "Into darkness, out of light / I plunged. Breathy in midlight, / I lost sight / of all below-- / there was no / bright crescendo. . . ." A suite of short poems written to the music of an unnamed Soviet composer stands out in retrospect as the book at its finest, but even there mundanity is pervasive.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0807118206
• ISBN 13: 9780807118207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64