Introduction: religious poetry in a secular age -- A mystical theology of angelic despair: writing religious poetry and the trilogy of Frank Samperi -- Robinson Jeffers, the man from whom god hid everything -- Spiritual osmosis: Geoffrey Hill's recent poetry -- Prophetic frustrations: Robert Duncan's Tribunals -- What lies beneath my copy of eternity? religious language in the poetry of Lissa Wolsak -- Catholics: reading Fanny Howe -- Robert Duncan's celestial hierarchy -- The long-huthered hajj: Nathaniel Mackey's esotericism -- Apocalypticism: a way forward for poetry.
Summary:
In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O'Leary offers a new reading of modern and contemporary poets' treatment of religion and the nature of the divine in a secular age. The book seeks to come to terms with an often obscured spiritual impulse that drives the production and imagination of American poetry.O'Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. He argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets' works is too often marginalized. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O'Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.
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