Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems.

Kolin, Philip C.

Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems. By Paul Mariani. The Poiema Poetry Series. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. ISBN 978-1-62032-191-1. Pp. 233. $26.00.

Every poet dreams about publishing a book like this. Paul Mariani's magnum opus, Epitaphs for the Journey crowns his 42-year career with six previous books of poems, several critical studies of poets, two collections of essays, a spiritual memoir, and five highly respected biographies of poets who have influenced his craft--William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Designed and illustrated by the eminent artist Barry Moser, Epitaphs is divided into eight sections, each containing a dozen poems and chronicling roughly a decade of Mariani's spiritual journey from his childhood in the 1940s through his role today as both a family man and a distinguished professor of English at Boston College. In his "Acknowledgements," he declares that this book has been "some thirty-seven years in the making." Of the 96 poems in the collection, 15 are new and at least 25 have been revised, but all of them are powerful examples of Mariani's Christian poetics. His title resonates with both spatial and spiritual meanings; the poems are roadside markers to the places, people, events, traumas (subtle as well as those flared with Heraclitean fire), conflicts and conversions, and encounters with mystery and transcendence that have forged Marianis faith. As if proleptic, two of his earlier poetry books were entitled Salvage Operations (1990) and Prime Mover (1985)--pointing to redemption and the eschaton.

The twelve poems in the first section, all anchored in the 1940s and 1950s, stand out with their sharp imagery, a Kodak-like memory, and a self-searching voice, gifts for which Mariani has been rightfully praised for four decades and which stamp the entire volume. He remembers when he was five seeing "trinities of bombers" over New York City, "ponderous / metal bees droning toward the west" ("The Furnace, July 1945"). Alone in front of a pre-World War II Dumont television set in "Christmas Eve 1945," images of army bulldozers pushing "white mannequins into the pit" tattooed themselves "upon my tattered brain," until now, all that remains of that vision is "an old cantor to sing them on their way" (33). Or helping his father run a Sinclair Station in Mineola, Long Island, Mariani knelt out back "among the jewelweed / & cinders, swabbing ball bearings in kerosene, / as I gloried in all I would in time become" (33).

Epitaphs is an anthology of voices speaking to, through, in, and from Mariani. One of the most gifted confessional poets of faith in the twenty-first century, Mariani weaves stories about himself, his wife, his children, his uncles, his father, his mother, and out to those "great grandchildren [where] all family looks are lost" (141). Again and again, he links these personal histories to sacred events and mysteries, so that many of his poems read like parables--straightforward on the surface, in the idiom of Mariani's New York and New Jersey upbringing, yet provocatively complex below.

Repeatedly he surprises readers with his juxtapositions. In "Sweater," from section two, he compares his father's advice on his "first real Saturday night date" to a religious rite of passage: "My bestowment / bar mitzvah, confirmation. Manhood's / humming threshold & inner sanctum moment" (43). While walking "among the stalls at Marrakech" in the "Annunciation" he is startled when a street performer "looped a freighted snake about my son's bare neck," and begged him to have "The thing taken away," only to turn to a recollection of a mother who "sighs goodnight" when she covers her child, "her sandal's heel firmly on the writhing serpent's head." The way Mariani skillfully builds up to and then shocks readers with this closing line is epiphanic, incarnational. His "Pieta" begins with a description of a New Year's Eve party at Mariani's brother's home and then moves to the tragic memory of the loss of a friend's "grown son who died just skin and bone / the nurses ... afraid / to cross over into a world no one seemed / to understand." Then follows a stanza beginning, "Consider Martha. Consider Lazarus four days gone." Linking the woman's loss to Martha's, who looked to Christ not having anyone to comfort her, Mariani implies that a resurrection will surely follow, and it does when the family priest, "who stood beside them through the dark / night of it all, a bull-like man, skin black / as the black he wore," turns out to be the only one in that AIDs ward

 willing to walk across death's threshold into
 that room. And now, she says, when death

 was over, to see him lift her son, light as a baby,
 with the changes death had wrought, and cradle him
 like that, then sing him on his way, a cross

 between a lullaby and blues. (133-34)

Mariani's line and stanza breaks, his iconically-charged imagery, and his narrative flow incarnate the promise of a loving God who saves, resurrects, and transforms US.

Above all, Mariani's poetry is highly allusive, as fourteen pages of notes appended to Epitaphs confirm. His poems have been shaped by Virgil and Dante, Edmund Campion and John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the confessional modes of Berryman and Lowell, the American idiom of Williams as well as the syntactic complexities of Wallace Stevens and the troubled visionary world of Hart Crane (the last three subjects of poems in Epitaphs). But it is Hopkins who remains the central figure in Mariani's thought and poetry. As the foremost biographer of Fr.

Hopkins, Mariani is uniquely positioned to understand and respond to this Jesuit poet-priest. In fact, Mariani continues the Jesuit tradition of poetics into the twenty-first century by infusing into his work the intensely meditative and self-purging rigors of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, which are unqualifyingly the foundation for much of Mariani's later poetry. A dozen years ago, in fact, he chronicled his own spiritual experiences in Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius.

The longest poem in Epitaphs, and one of Mariani's finest, "The Eastern Point Meditations" flows in fact from Mariani's Ignatian-driven spiritual diary, where he prays over "the meaning of Isaiah until my eyes were stinging" (117). Seeking exculpation for his transgressive behavior, Mariani turns inward with profound imagery and thought. Amid the craggy geography of the penitential Massachusetts coast and "the ageless story of endless problems & consolations," he lays bare his soul as he ponders "The Journey to the Land of the Dead." In a sense, the "Meditations" are Mariani's antiphon to Hopkins' confrontation with death and resurrection in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" just as surely as "Hopkins in Ireland" can be seen as Mariani's response to "The Windhover." Both are Italian sonnets, both seek transcendence through a bird (Mariani's first line is haunting--"Above the blue-bleak priest the bright-blue fisher hovers"), and both are courageously confessional. Thanks to Mariani's psychic connection to Hopkins, we enter the priest's thoughts as he prepares to grade his students' essays and fight "against the dragon din of error."

Ultimately, though, Epitaphs maps Mariani's journey to mystery, to God. At age seventeen, he thought he had a calling to the religious life. In "Photograph of Oldest Son," he reveals a painful episode from his year spent in Beacon, New York, back in the mid-1950s as a "Postulant in the Society of Mary." As he and his parents uneasily compose "themselves before the camera / each one careful not to touch the other" (50), we feel Mariani's sad intrusion of the quotidian in a religious setting. And when his own son, now a priest, entered the Jesuits in the early 1990s, Mariani's "Quid Pro Quo" recalls a God who gifted him with this "little Buddha-bellied / rumplestiltskin runt of a man" twenty-five years before. "Worst / best," he remembers, "just last year, / This same son, grown / to manhood now, knelt before a marble altar to vow / everything he had to the same God I had had my own / erstwhile dealings with." In trying to bargain with God for the boy, the poet has learned that God seems to up "the ante each time He answers one sign with another." Believing once he "had seen enough of God's erstwhile ways toward man" (81), he has come to see that his God is full of surprises. While the poem captures Mariani's awe-filled wrestling with the divine, his poems overwhelmingly explore the manifest ways human beings try to see, confront, understand, and--finally--come to praise the Maker.

Perhaps the two most important theological lessons this postlapsarian world has had to teach Mariani are "learning how to live on less & less" ("On the Limits of Transcendence," 104) and accepting the "cost of loving" (80). When he and his wife lost their first child, he "Thank[ed] God they baptized him before they took / the little guy away. Call it a beginning, this loss" ("Beginnings" 79). In a long and distinguished career as a poet of faith, Paul Mariani has been enfolded in the Christian paradox that our earthly loss can be transformed into heavenly gain.

Philip C. Kolin

University of Southern Mississippi