Customer Reviews

The Poets' Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium

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I have a strong interest in meditative poetry and assumed that this book would provide some profound commentary to enlighten me further in my readings and re-readings. No such luck. I found the author to be arbitrary in her selections, one-dimensional in her interpretations, and--what makes both of those qualities even worse--she has the kind of nagging insistence of a know-it-all schoolmarm. Her directive tone is so domineering that she almost has to be insincere at the core. One does hope to open up to another reader's suggestions about a text, but this author has the effect of making me want to slam my doors and shutter my windows. (Perhaps her relentless misreading of Blake encouraged me to invoke those images. Actually, I just closed the book!) I suppose I more than most don't like being preached at, but even so, most readers would agree, I think, that Rosenthal's sermonizing is a ministry to avoid.

Something smells fishy here. I too read this featherweight bit of quasi-scholarship and can hear the author in my mind's ear, only what I hear is alternately shrill and smarmy. There is a self-satisfied and sanctimonious tone to this text, and given its narrowness of content and limited insight, the tone is most peculiar. I originally picked up the book with the notion that it was a parody. (Stupid of me not to notice the publisher!) I can only say, I wish it had been a parody. But perhaps the good doctor's review of it is the parody I was looking for.

Peggy Rosenthal's "The Poets' Jesus" should be a Pulitzer nominee. This is an extraordinary work of scholarship by a gifted writer whose love of and joy in poetry is both cerebral and visceral. Rosenthal has read carefully,thoughtfully and sympathetically the poetry about Jesus from biblical times to the present, by poets from every continent, and shown how images of Jesus have changed with time and place, from prophet to divine to romantic hero to epitome of morality, and always an inspiration to poetic imagination. Rosenthal's prose is itself sheer poetry, carefully honed, full of imagery, punctuated with sly wit. This is not only an assessment, a penetrating analysis of the poetry, but a tapestry of brief biographies to fit each poet into her or his time, insights into those influences that framed the poets' views of Jesus. The jacket tells us that Rosenthal "offers courses and retreats on poetry and spitituality." I can visualize her and hear her in my mind as I read tthis book; every now and then she interpolates direct comments to the reader that make us feel we are sitting in on one of the retreats with a good-humored teacher who communicates to us her love of language, poetry, the miracle of the hum,an mind, and a saving spirituality. I have read passages again and again.,