Description: Mariani brings to light issues surrounding spirituality and poetry through discussions of the Gnostics, Roman history, the Bible, John of the Cross, Rilke, Robert Pack, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and the poets he most admires--Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.
Brief description: PAUL MARIANI is the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and five volumes of poetry, including, most recently, The Great Wheel. Besides several critical studies, he has also published biographies of Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and John Berryman. Mariani currently holds a Chair in English at Boston College.
Review Quotes:
Mariani comes on as a modern working class Whitman who has not forgotten his origins. He writes a redemptive and humane criticism that attempts to preserve rather than to deconstruct or destroy. In Mariani's sympathy for the lives that have touched his, we see how this biographer of poets has extended that sympathy to his great subjects: William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. To read Mariani is to recognize a genuine love for poets and poetry is possible without tendentiousness or a theoretical agenda. Would that every poet writing in America today had an advocate as generous.
--Mark Jarman