DOES ANYONE OUT there remember Sister Corita Kent (1918-86)? Her posters, brightly-colored with handmade-looking shapes and inspirational quotations, were part of the landscape in the late 60s and early 70s if you were in any of the various milieus where religion cohabited with ideals of social justice. The underlying message was typically thoughtful and serious, but the design was usually bold and cheerful. If you do not remember Corita, you could search for her work right now, and as soon as you saw it you would say, “oh…that sort of thing.”
Yes. Well, the cover of Christian Wiman’s anthology looks like a Corita poster (though actually the work of an artist named Mary Valencia). And it radiates the same vibe, we might say: cheerful and bold, but also serious and thoughtful, suitable for every enlightened home.
The anthology walks a fine line. Its orientation is religious, I would say, and vaguely Christian, but there are no “thank you Jesus” poems here (although gratitude appears frequently) and there is none of the spirit that animates the folks who stand by government buildings with posters of bloodied embryos. As you might expect if you have read Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, the joy in the anthology is religiously grounded but curiously astringent, streaked with pain and loss.
But how many copies can you hope to sell of a poetry anthology titled Curiously Astringent Joy Streaked with Pain and Loss: 100 Poems? Not many, obviously. Better just call it Joy and commission a Corita-esque cover.
The poetry maintains high standards, as you might guess from knowing Wiman helmed Poetry magazine during one of its better periods. Mainly American, mainly from the last 40-50 years, not much that you would call experimental or avant-garde (does have a Gertrude Stein poem, though), mainly well-known poets, but reasonably diverse within those parameters. Highly readable, deftly arranged, salted with well-chosen prose excerpts…an arrow headed for the bull’s-eye in the heart of any progressive, literate person of faith…are there such people still around? If you build it, will they come?
It’s actually a little difficult to imagine that the audience the anthology imagines is still around in the Year or Our Lord 2021. But maybe.
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