Unholy Sonnets: Poems

by JARMAN MARK

• ISBN13: 9781885266880
• ISBN10: 188526688X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Consortium Book Sales & Dist

Summary

Unholy Sonnets is the author's seventh collection of poetry, his first since the celebrated Questions for Ecclesiastes, which confirmed Mark Jarman's emergence as a major American poet. Following up on the memorable sequence of "Unholy Sonnets", Questions for Ecclesiastes, creates an entire book that inverts John Donne's asking of God, "Are You there, and do You hear?"

Unholy Sonnets continues the work Jarman began in Questions for Ecclesiastes. This new series of poems strives to create devotional poetry written against the grain, without assumptions about faith or shared belief. That is why these sonnets are called "unholy". They aim to avoid piety, while also testing the limits and conventions of the sonnet form.

Taking off from the series of sonnets in Questions for Ecclesiastes, Unholy Sonnets explores more fully the relationship between what the soul desires and what creation allows. These new poems investigate the nature of prayer, incarnation, judgement, and grace, while trying to imagine a God large enough to hold the universe and personal enough t

Author Biography

Mark Jarman is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Prologue	15	(19)
I
The Word ``Answer''	19	(3)
Which is the One, Which of the IMPS Inside	22	(1)
Soften the Blow, Imagined God, and Give	23	(1)
I Think of Gosse, Watching his Father Paint	24	(1)
The Thin End of the Wedge Thrusts Underneath	25	(1)
Outside My Door I Keep an Angel Chained	26	(1)
In Which of these Details Does God Inhere?	27	(1)
He Loads his Weapons, But the Lord God Sees Him	28	(1)
Someone is Always Praying as the Plane	29	(1)
Have Healed the Flesh and Changed the Mind of Weather	30	(1)
This Boy Listening Eagerly to his Friend	31	(1)
God Does Not Know, God is What is Known	32	(3)
II
Blessedness---Not Only in a Face	35	(1)
In Via Est Cisterna	36	(1)
She is a Cloud in Her Own Sunny Day	37	(1)
And If When He Returned He Found His Mother	38	(1)
A Living Room. Gray Walls and Carpet, Light	39	(1)
Cycle	40	(3)
The Devil Comes on the Air Waves, Crooning	43	(1)
One Model Asks Another, ``What Do You Eat?''	44	(1)
Think of the Harsh Attire that God Put on	45	(1)
What Will We Give Up in the After Life	46	(1)
How Long was Their Grief---So Inconsolable	47	(1)
Breath Like a House Fly Batters the Shut Mouth	48	(3)
III
Nothing But Pleasure in the Bottle's Voice	51	(1)
Ray's Body Lies Below a Slab That States	52	(1)
We Crowded in the Taxi. It was Dawn	53	(1)
I'll Bet the Final Reckoning's Like This	54	(1)
``Here is the Soul.'' He Pointed to a Place	55	(1)
Sightings	56	(3)
Put on the Costume Jewelry and Chapeau	59	(1)
There is a Law Outside The Daily Racket	60	(1)
Lord, Spare Me From the Drowsiness that Starts	61	(1)
Although I Know God's Immanence Can Speak	62	(1)
The Yellow Blister Wears a Ring of Red	63	(1)
He Will Not Let us Blame Him Easily	64	(3)
IV
I Can't Do More Than This. I Can't Do Less	67	(1)
I Need an Image for the Soul and Choose	68	(1)
Which Ones Should I Believe Among the Voices	69	(1)
History Happening and People Living	70	(1)
Fallen Persimmons Among the Dew-Bent Grasses	71	(1)
Instead, You Can Walk Backwards into Life	72	(1)
So Many Creatures and So Many Minds	73	(1)
The Gift For All Our Waking in This Life	74	(1)
He Passes Through The Rolled-Up Warehouse Door	75	(1)
Nashville Moon	76	(1)
I Laid It Out, How a Would Beat Its Wings	77	(1)
The World	78	(5)
Epilogue	83