As one would expect by the title, "Unholy Sonnets" concerns itself almost wholly with religion and concepts related to religion. Before reading the book at all, I assumed the poems would mostly be about rejecting God and be fairly clear in atheist beliefs. Upon reading, however, I found that each poem was very different in its attitude towards God. The tones ranged from praising God to strongly challenging God’s “wisdom” and compassion. One gets the sense of a genuine confusion and “lost” feeling with regards to religion. Here is an example of one of the more overtly questioning poems:
(7)
In which of these details does God inhere?
The woman’s head in the boy’s lap? His punctured lung?
The place she had bitten through her tongue?
The drunk’s truck in three pieces? The drunk’s beer,
Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?
The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung
The roadside and dropped limp strings among
The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?
Where in the details, the cleverness of man
To add a gracenote God might understand,
Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?
I think it’s here, in this one: the open can
The drunk placed by the dead woman’s hand,
Telling her sond, who cried for help, “Good luck.”
I won’t close-read the poem, but it is clear that the speaker questions God’s motivations and compassion through the subject matter alone.
Science also appears several times throughout the work, raising the issue of coexistence of religion and science. There are references to pi, meteors, atoms, and the dual wave/particle nature of light (a quantum theory allusion). One portion of a poem seems to very directly raise the issue of science and faith:
(4, 12th line)
He saw and heard the marine biologist pray
As if he could, by word and gesture only,
Pry open the mute heavens like a bivalve.
My first thought was of Seinfeld, but after that it was of the speaker watching from afar, chuckling to himself as he knew a man of science could not possibly communicate with God. None of the other poems are as direct as this in raising the issue of science and faith.
The poems also display subtle humor at times:
(47, 4th line of second stanza)
And asked if I knew how to make God laugh.
Dazed by my brilliance, I didn’t get the question.
He paused for breath, then whispered, “Have a plan.”
In some poems Jarman barely fit the sonnet form and in others perfectly followed its rules. The only sonnet “rule” that is found in all poems is that each one consists of fourteen lines, or if a longer poem, each stanza contains fourteen lines. Poem 6 almost perfectly fits the Italian sonnet as it has an eight line stanza followed by a six line, all in iambic pentameter, and with an abba abba rhyme scheme in the first stanza. The other poems range in adherence to sonnet form from that of poem 6, to seemingly free verse poems with 14 lines.
2 comments:
Jahan--
I believe you have already seen the logic behind pairing you with Mark Jarman's book. As our resident formalist, I think you have a lot in common with Jarman, and I hope Unholy Sonnets has you thinking about the relationship between form and content.
We tend to have a very clear picture of what a sonnet is; Jarman plays with this idea. How do you see the form interacting with the content of the poems? What conclusions can you draw about the relationship between level of strictness and the speaker's tone? Has reading this book changed your perception of the sonnet and its potential uses?
By contrasting the formality of the sonnet with the chaos of a car wreck, Jarman seems as if he is poking fun at the sonnet. By using such a stiff form, Jarman also comments on the way by which we want to neaten things like a drunk's accident, to eliminate emotion and reduce such scenes to tiny, generic news blurbs, or to brief mentions in the paper. Similarly, the sonnet's occasionally unappealing nature serves to distance us from the accident.
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