Book Review: The Wanton Sublime - New Poetry From Anna Rabinowitz

In her third volume of poetry, The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates an extended meditation upon the Annunciation — the moment that starts everything in traditional Christian believing — the moment the angel Gabriel appears to a young Mary and tells her she's going to be the mother of God. As a Protestant male, I may not be best positioned to review such poetry. More so given that I belong to a denomination which is comfortable ordaining openly gay clergy. In the faith community I frequent, concerns about the Annunciation have been tossed into a dusty remainder bin, and its controversies passed long ago. Why should I care what women are saying now about the Annunciation?

Then I look to my daughter, 13 years old, confirmed only two months ago, blithely ignorant of the hard–won concessions her mother and grandmothers struggled to secure, all too willing to waive rights whose price she cannot estimate. Once, Mary was (and often continues to be) held up by traditional religious leaders as a model of submissive piety to be emulated by good Christian women everywhere. But women like Anna Rabinowitz offer different understandings of this model.

In fact, she herself serves as a model of how women can think and can interpret ancient stories in fresh ways that take account of realities which would otherwise go ignored if viewed only through the lens of piety's idealism. These are the messy realities of bodies and sexuality and gender and reproduction, the fact of power and its exercise both to raise people up and to beat them down. As a model, Rabinowitz has the further advantage of a balanced view. She is not an iconoclast. Undergirding even her most searching words is an unmistakable reverence.

Approaching the volume's themes: the question of interruption appears in the first lines of the first poem: "It begins in a far meadow, a bright room, a hillside thick with time / A woman in a field of flowers interrupted and carried away". Traditionally, the messiah is figured as the insertion of God into history, making the timeless subject to time. But to average people (like Mary before Gabriel's appearance), the insertion stops the expected flow of time. Is it right that God should demand of a woman that she drop everything in order to gestate a heavenly child?

Rabinowitz uses different devices to convey this notion of interruption. She breaks up lines so that the eye is interrupted and has to move across the page to complete the thoughts. She also suggests the image of a reading Mary, part-way through a book, forced by distraction to look up from the page. I am an obsessive compulsive reader; I hate distraction; and so such a picture is highly accessible to me. This image also signals a second important thematic strand drawn through most of these poems — the relationship between our believing and our words.

Certainly within traditional Christianity, the importance of language is a given: John says that the messiah is the Logos, the Word. This spawned an entire branch of theological discourse that continues to produce new insights. In fact, in their preoccupation with literary theory, post-modern theologians have had a field day with the idea of the Word and its place in current exegetical practice. Rabinowitz has her fun too. In an early poem she introduces "rod of I" and "round of O", letters become phallus and womb. In a later poem "Cloak, Perfect Cloud," the I and O merge to become Io, a lesser goddess of the Greek pantheon who, like Mary, had a bit of an encounter with a supreme deity. In this case, Zeus did the deed while cloaked in the whiteness of a cloud: "Desire snares her in its stricken cold–mist net, / taboos the sun from shedding light on dark." This turns traditional imagery on its head (or perhaps on its back): divine consummation is supposed to bring light to the world, but this consummation casts the world, not in darkness, but in obscurity.

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

Visit David Barker's author page — David Barker's Blog