Book Review: The Wanton Sublime - New Poetry From Anna Rabinowitz - Page 2

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.

And with the line, "Thunder, perfect Inundation," we have an interesting allusion to a text from the Nag Hammadi library, notorious for its very human account of the seminal events of the Christian tradition. Elsewhere, Rabinowitz makes it clear that she ties the Mary story to other Earth mother goddess fertility traditions that sprang up in the Mediterranean basin long before early Christians reworked the script.

What about Mary's freedom to choose? "Is this virginity enslaved," asks Rabinowitz. Is it "a freedom without will / a freedom named obedience"? There is a paradox at work in the Annunciation: the liberating force of submitting to duty. On one view, God is just another oppressive man putting a woman in her place; but on another view, God vaults Mary into a deeper participation. Which is it?

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.

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