Second Sky: Poems by Tania Runyan (review)

subjects.’’ Later on in the essay Kirsch concedes that ‘‘In his late work,’’ that is, post-1995, ‘‘one can come to grips, as never before, with the kind of poet—the kind of man—he is’’. What Kirsch finds in Hill is ‘‘pride, erudition, self-reproach, histrionic contempt and despair,’’ as well as a belief ‘‘in the importance of art, thought, and faith as related expressions of human nobility.’’ All this is well and good, and shows in Kirsch an ability to charitably warm to Hill. But what he fails to highlight—and what Murphy and Williams and several other essayists in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Later Work get right—is Hill’s understanding of the metaphysical problem that underlies both the existential and abstract realms: the ‘‘deep dynastic wound’’ of sin, which naught but holistic confession can remedy. The danger that Hill has been pointing to for his entire career is that such confession—earnest, wise, truly contrite—often proves near impossible, not least of which for Hill himself. This is Hill’s gift to us: not faith, experience, or conscience , so much as self-reflexive warning, and, as in Orchards of Syon, a strainpitched note of hope. It is tempting to conclude that while this collection of critical essays provides many careful and subtle readings of an important poet, Hill will simply never be as popular or widely read as a more demotic poet like Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney. But I’m hesitant to conclude this. I remember the example of T. S. Eliot, an equally ‘‘difficult’’ poet who set out not to mar the English language, but to ‘‘purify the dialect of the tribe’’ through what seemed to many a marring. Eliot now enjoys an undeniably canonical status, and his most difficult poems, like ‘‘The Wasteland’’ and ‘‘Ash Wednesday,’’ are read in schoolrooms across the English-speaking world. Dare we hope that someday the same can be said for Broken Hierarchies? Timothy E. G. Bartel Houston Baptist University Tania Runyan, Second Sky: Poems. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013. Pp. x + 73. $12.00. ISBN 978-1-62564-288-2. It would not be inaccurate to describe Tania Runyan as a devotional poet. She doesn’t flinch from addressing God in her poems, casting her questions or anger or grief or guilt in the general direction of the divine. She probes the means and the meaning of salvation. Her view of the immediate, temporal world is always colored by an awareness of, or hope for, a transcendent, eternal one. Some poems read like prayers, others like lyrical distress signals from the spiritual wasteland known as suburbia, or as one poem aptly puts it, ‘‘the valley / of the shadow of ease’’ (18). Yet ‘‘devotional poet’’ too often implies a kind of willful religiosity that ignores difficulty, a forced praise that feels cloying and naı̈ve, as sweet and insubstantial as whipped cream. Tania Runyan is not that kind of devotional poet. On the contrary , she is devoted to poetry as a medium of spiritual struggle; her poems uncover grace without glossing pain, confusion, doubt, and even apathy. 124 Christianity & Literature 65(1) The poems in Second Sky tread thematic ground that will be familiar to readers of Runyan’s three previous volumes, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, a chapbook the CCL honored with its Book of the Year award in 2007. Like those books, Runyan’s newest collection confronts the tensions between belief and practice, between ancient and modern, between scripture and art, between feminine experience and the patriarchal history of Christianity. Though Second Sky shows Runyan in full command of her craft, the book brings no major departures in style or subject. For this reason it is a worthy entry-point for readers unacquainted with this poet’s growing body of work, which explores the aforementioned conflicts in a voice that is disarmingly personal. By turns, that voice may be wryly self-mocking: ‘‘My 4G works, but dammit—He’ll see me / refresh’’ (62); or vulnerable, as when describing a ‘‘cycling of faith: / a little light in the morning, lifting a hand / in prayer, then dozing to the...