George Herbert by Neil Curry and Natasha Curry, and: A Year with George Herbert: A Guide to Fifty-Two of His Best Loved Poems by Jim Scott Orrick (review)

While neither Neil Curry and Natasha Curry's George Herbert nor Jim Scott Orrick's A Year with George Herbert is addressed to a scholarly audience, readers of the George Herbert Journal may nonetheless want to be aware of these two endeavors. Both expand the range of Herbertian studies, making Herbert's work accessible to a much wider audience.

George Herbert is part of the Greenwich Exchange Student Guide Literary Series. This small independent British publisher has issued a number of works in a series that is meant to provide students and the general reader both a historical overview and analysis of the works of major writers. Poet Neil Curry and his daughter Natasha Curry successfully present an introduction to George Herbert and a sensitive reading of his poems within a seventeenth-century literary, religious, political, and cultural context. From the first Herbert is depicted not as Walton's holy Mr. Herbert but as a complex human being writing technically brilliant poetry rather than simple pious pieces, surely the view of Herbert and his literary work that teachers of seventeenth-century literature would want their students to recognize.

Curry and Curry begin with a brief biography of the poet within the context of his family and his time. Care is taken to make the poet's experiences relevant to the twenty-first-century student. Herbert's position as Public Orator at Cambridge, for example, is described as that of a "public relations officer," who is "networking on behalf of the university" (p. 12). Similarities between seventeenth-century students and today's students are also stressed: "Students at Trinity in 1609 sound surprisingly like those of today" (p. 11) and "Again, like students of today, Herbert soon found his reading list longer than his budget could manage" (p. 12). Such a familiarizing of Herbert's experience occurs not just in this section of the book but throughout the text and makes Herbert seem less remote, less foreign.

In the next section, "The Country Parson and 'The Church-porch,' " the focus moves from details of the poet's life to his character and personality. Assuming at least some of Herbert's poems are autobiographical, Curry and Curry turn first to his prose "to learn something more of the man, his aims and his beliefs" (p. 17). The Herbert depicted here is "not a saint" but rather a "sometimes quick-tempered, sometimes haughty aristocrat" (p. 18). This section places The Country Parson in the genre of the character sketch and discusses it as a political document, reflecting the "Stuart political ideal of centralisation and the imposition from the centre of obedience and conformity to the norms and practices of the Church of England" (p. 21).

Chapter 3 deals with metaphysical poetry, acknowledging both the difficulty of defining the term and modern critics' disregard for it. The chapter considers Herbert's poetry in the context of Donne's.

The remaining sections ("The Hieroglyphic Poems," "Poems on Poetry," "Parables and Narratives," "The Passion," and "Confessions") provide insightful readings of some of the poems within "The Church" as well as noting the relationship poems have to one another. While discounting an overall design to The Temple, Curry and Curry do recognize sequences within the work (p. 35). They see in the hieroglyphic poems the manifestation of Herbert's wit (intelligence) in shaped poems like "The Altar" and "Easter-wings" and in poems in which structure is an "integral part of the context" (p. 39) - "Sinnes round," "A Wreath," and "Trinitie Sunday," for example. As they discuss Herbert's poems on poetry, they recognize that Herbert's "technical skill is almost without parallel" (p. 44) and note how much he must have enjoyed writing (p. 46). Recalling that Herbert in...