Review of 'Christian Poetry in America Since 1940' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
I've flipped and read in this volume a lot now looking for poetry that is Christian rather than just employing language that sounds vaguely spiritual — there are maybe a handful or fewer in the whole volume. For every three poems by William Baer responding to Scripture, there are countless that pray to Eve as if she were divine instead of to God, or that try to reshape God into the image of the Native American "Great Spirit" and ascribe sin and failure to Him in the process, or that elevate human behaviors (even sinful ones) to the status of being holy somehow rather than signs of sin's curse.
There is in most of this less meter or form or skill or semblance of Christianity and more streams-of-consciousness new-age syncretism and pantheism and straight-up secularism.
This reads a bit like what an unbelieving academic who's never encountered Christianity might think …
I've flipped and read in this volume a lot now looking for poetry that is Christian rather than just employing language that sounds vaguely spiritual — there are maybe a handful or fewer in the whole volume. For every three poems by William Baer responding to Scripture, there are countless that pray to Eve as if she were divine instead of to God, or that try to reshape God into the image of the Native American "Great Spirit" and ascribe sin and failure to Him in the process, or that elevate human behaviors (even sinful ones) to the status of being holy somehow rather than signs of sin's curse.
There is in most of this less meter or form or skill or semblance of Christianity and more streams-of-consciousness new-age syncretism and pantheism and straight-up secularism.
This reads a bit like what an unbelieving academic who's never encountered Christianity might think is Christian, just by virtue of vague familiarity with some words that TV preachers might have mentioned before.
Which is all to say, it's not worth a space on the shelf, sadly. And I don't feel like I could donate it, since it could give an absolutely false impression of what Christianity is (and for fear that someone younger might pick it up and read the poems that — with no forewarning from this collection's editors — linger on rape and graphically describe lynchings).