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Waging War on Silence
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19303 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
3,016 Words |
| Author
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Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
IF I HAD WHEELS OR LOVE
Collected Poems of Vassar Miller
with an Introduction by George Garrett
Vassar Miller
Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1991
358 pp., $28.95
It is the work and province of poets to express in their art both the common human experience and the values and sensibility of the times in which they live. A rare few, however, are possessed of the grace and genius to act as poet-prophets for their times. Their task is often to work against the sensibility of their day and to affirm those values the zeitgeist is in danger of discarding, or even outright suppressing. In an age when poetry often serves as exercises in self-absorption, or attempts to pass off vulgarity and pretentiousness as profundity and street smarts as wit; at a time when poetry appears to be dying of terminal solipsism, it is gratifying to discover just such a prophetic voice--an extraordinary poet applying her genius to expression of that numinous reality that Nietzsche and our times insist is dead: God. In the so-called post-Christian era, here is an un-apologetic Christian poet with a formidable and very literary power of faith.
Vassar Miller is not, however, a newcomer on the poet's stage, having published her first book of poetry in 1956. In the intervening decades she has remained a persistent presence on that stage, with publication of seven successive volumes of verse. At no time in her long career has Vassar Miller belonged to any "school" of poetry, implying a classroom of poets all facing one way. Neither can she be classed a poet in the typically southern tradition, though she was born in Houston, Texas (in 1924), and has lived there all her life. Like her boldly insistent faith put to art in a faithless age, so too her style, voice, craft, and power are boldly her own. She ranges with equal ease and skill among traditional metric verses and original, freer forms.
Her poems are arrestingly eloquent, yet wonderfully spare. Her imaginary is daring, richly suggestive, and seemingly unlimited--mined from the depths of spirit and life lived, not manufactured; good imagery can never be manufactured. And though her diction is distinctively strong and clear, it is not always easy, for the transcendent is never easy to reduce to words. But there are no vanities of willful obscurities here. She seeks, after all, to give expression to that intuition of God's presence, to the realities
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