Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse by William Woolfitt (review)

While we may think of books of poetry as collections of loosely connected lyrical effusions, poets have, in recent years, increasingly published tightly themed collections, sometimes even creating narrative out of a series of lyric poems. Many of the last decade's most read volumes of poetry have taken this unified approach – Claudia Rankine's Citizen, for example, or Traci Brimhall's Our Lady of the Ruins. Of course, if one looks further back – into what, for contemporary American poetry, sometimes seems the distant past, such as the 80s and 90s – one finds poets like Andrew Hudgins and Dana Gioia attempting to bring extended narrative back into the mainstream of American verse. If one wished to be cynical, one might float the hypothesis that the ascension of the clearly delineated poetic "project" over the loose method of conglomeration by which most collections of poetry from mid-century through the 80s, at least, were organized is due to the ever increasing emphasis on the achievement of grants and fellowships in American poetry, it being eminently easier to craft a convincing grant application for a tightly conceived project than one for whatever poems come in whatever order they come. But the cynical explanation is incomplete.

The return to cohesion and narrative meets a real need for readers. Over thirty years ago, in a famous essay, "The Rhapsodic Fallacy," first appearing in Salmagundi, Mary Kinzie complained that contemporary poets assume that "intensity can only be achieved in spontaneous, fragmented utterance," an attitude that has led to the decline of poetic kinds such as the epistle, the allegory, and the epic ("The Rhapsodic Fallacy," 1984). Poets like William Woolfitt, however, are working to bring these modes of writing back to contemporary poetry. Woolfitt's Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse at once engages with experimental, postmodern poetry – even "fragmented utterance" – yet also revives several traditional kinds of poetry: narrative, epic, epistle, and even hagiography.

A biography in verse is a difficult thing to pull off, particularly when one constructs it from a series of lyric poems, rather than, say, as a continuous blank verse narrative. Woolfitt is fortunate in his choice of subject. Like the lives of Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, and Shakespeare's Prince Hal, Charles de Foucauld's life fits the dramatic pattern of the prodigal son, which means it is a fairly simple matter to epitomize the subject at various stages in his journey through life: boy, dashing young profligate, Trappist novice, hermit, martyr. Charles de Foucauld was born in Strasbourg in 1858, and went to live with his grandfather after the death of his parents six years later. After spending his youth as a profligate, apostate, and officer in the army, he discovered his yearning for God while touring Morocco. Charles spent seven years as a Trappist monk, was ordained as a priest, and went to live among the Tauregs in the Sahara, where he was martyred in 1916. Woolfitt uses each lyric as a window on Charles in a particular moment, at a particular step. The effect is not so much like character development in a conventional novel or biography as it is like a series of glimpses. Yet the overall sense of a cohesive narrative remains.

The earliest poems in the book, those focused on Charles' childhood, are extremely elliptical and fragmentary, as if we are witnessing a consciousness not yet coalescing itself from the data around it. The first poem, "My Father as Weather Formation," ends with a surreal flourish: "Man of fidgets // and glances, soon to appear in the clouds as beasts / for me to name, and fall on his woods like snow" (3). In the second poem, Charles describes "[his] Mother as Harp Seal, as Sacristan." The child's impressions of the world around him are intense but incoherent. He imagines the miscarriage for which his mother grieves: "like a clump / of snow from a shaken branch, he fell / from...