cover image Signs and Abominations

Signs and Abominations

Bruce Beasley. Wesleyan University Press, $26 (150pp) ISBN 978-0-8195-6455-9

One hundred and fifty years ago, these passionate ruminations on the cultural and spiritual needs of a wayward people would have been cast in metered rhyme, but Beasley's latest poetic jeremiad isn't simply a premodern poetry prettified according to postmodern sensibilities; it's the record of a confrontation with modernity in which modernity's victory over faith is not acknowledged. Like Flannery O'Connor before him--an acknowledged inspiration--or Annie Dillard today, Beasley finds in ugliness and in the profane an affirmation rather than repudiation of the idea of God, and has consistently said so in books like Spirituals, The Creation and Summer Mystagogia. The best poems here, especially, ""Hyperlinks: Incomplete Void"" and the terrific ""Mutating Villanelle,"" have a density of language and observed detail that capture, in their vertiginous forms, the qualities of modern life that the weaker poems rehearse more journalistically. Unfortunately, the images that fascinate Beasley--""Monica Lewinsky's/ blue semen-stained dress,"" ""the plexiglass Popemobile,"" ""Jeffrey Dahmer on A&E,"" ""the lamb-clone Dolly""--more often don't quite come off as damaged signs of god, having been exploited so variously and so often elsewhere. Some of the metaphors and juxtapositions are fresher, but others are merely self-dramatizing (""All August,/ staring at Michelangelo's judging/ angels, eyes rolled up in their heads,/ I loathed// myself for my self-loathing""), or reveal a gift for description impeded by the book's primarily discursive thrust. In the end, the book stakes its success on the quality of its depiction and discussion of contemporary life, and from this standpoint, the results are only mixed. Readers may want to dig out Edward Taylor's meditations or Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom to experience this mode at the source. (Nov.)