"Measures of Grace": Religious Consciousness in Jeff Daniel Marion's Poetry

FEATURED AUTHOR—JEFF DANIEL MARION "Measures of Grace": Religious Consciousness in Jeff Daniel Marion's Poetry John Lang MOST PUBLISHED COMMENTARY ON THE POETRY OF JEFF DANIEL MARION draws a connection between this poet's writing and religious consciousness. Dan Leidig, for instance, the first critic to offer an extended analysis of Marion's poetry, states, "The places Marion recovers in his poetry are hallowed places, reverentially and lovingly arranged, not merely as matters of record, but as intercessions for the human quest" ("On the Rim of Knowing" 155). Gerald Wood, one of the poet's colleagues at Carson-Newman College, says of Marion's own quest that it "is essentially a religious one" and remarks of the changes in Marion's poetry over his first two books: "the poetry ... has become more religious in the existential sense. The poet is like a priest who makes an endless quest toward meaning and order in a world rimmed by darkness" ("The Poetry of Jeff Daniel Marion" 40, 42). Reviewing Marion's third collection, Vigils, Larry Richman notes that the book's final section, "Simple Gifts," reflects "the tight interweave of time and eternity, Below and Above" ("Interview/ Review of Vigils" 14). Both Rita Quillen and Lynn Powell refer to Marion as a "mystic" ("Jeff Daniel Marion" 41; "Climb the Mountain Daily and Remember" 14), while Lynne Shackelford links Marion to American Transcendentalism and, more specifically, to Emerson's claim that "Nature is the symbol of spirit." "In his work," observes Shackelford, "Marion constantly moves from physical reality to spiritual insight through metaphor" ("Jeff Daniel Marion" 323). Because religion is one of the central features of Appalachian culture, none of this may be surprising. Yet anyone who has read widelyboth in Marion's work and in that ofhis contemporaries among the region's poets is likely to be struck by what is absent from Marion's poems in terms of religious subject matter. There is, for example, virtually no God-talk in these poems, almost no direct reference to the deity, in sharp contrast to the poetry of Charles Wright, with its anguished exploration of the problem of belief in the modern—or postmodern—world. Nor is there any elaborate Dantean schema like 26 that in Fred Chappell's Midquest, nor does one find a profusion of explicitly religious poems like Chappell's "An Old Mountain Woman Reading the Book of Job" or "Scarecrow Colloquy" (which Chappell presents as "An Epilogue to the Gospels"). Despite Marion's tacit rejection of what Shackelford calls the "narrow-minded denominationalism and aggressive proselytizing" of the Southern Baptist tradition in which the poet was raised ("Jeff Daniel Marion" 320), Marion's poems generally omit any references to childhood experiences of church-going of the sort that occur regularly in Robert Morgan's poetry: in "Prayer Meeting," "Church Pews," "After Church," and "The Gift of Tongues," among many others. Nor does Marion evince the anxiety about salvation and damnation apparent in Morgan's "Signs" and "Face" (though "Graven Image" of Letters Home is a recent notable exception to his usual silence about such matters). In comparison to the poetry of Chappell and Morgan and Wright, Marion's work may at first appear almost secular. What, then, are the qualities or features in his poetry that have led so many critics to identify him as a poet with religious concerns? One way to approach this question is to consider what we mean by the term "religion" in its broadest sense. Winston L. King, writing in the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, acknowledges the difficulty of defining the essence of this term, but offers readers several traditional definitions that help to illuminate the religious dimension of Marion's poetry. These include Friedrich Schleiermacher's view that religion is a "feeling of absolute dependence," Rudolf Otto's emphasis on awe in the presence of the holy, and Mircea Eliade's conception of religion as involving an awareness of "sacred space" (including rivers and trees and mountains), not just encounters between human beings and God ("Religion" 283-85). King's own definition, intended to encompass as many religious traditions as possible, is as follows: "Religion is the organization of life around...