The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity

Paul Mariani has spent the past fifty years trying to write a poetry which celebrates the vibrant sacramentality of life in the twilight of Modernity. Many of those years he spent writing the lives of Williams, Berryman, Lowell, Hart Crane, Stevens, and Hopkins, the Jesuit responsible for Mariani's becoming a poet in the first place. "It is difficult," Williams wrote, "to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Still, he pleaded to be heard, which is what Mariani asks of us now, as he celebrates a poetry which speaks even more directly of what the good news is.