Every Tongue Confess by David Craig, and: Confidence by David Craig (review)

David Craig’s new books of poems will provide inspiration and solace for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. His forte is a particular slant on the sacramental vision that characterizes Catholic and often other Christian poetry. Bill Donaghy comments, of this perspective, “It shows us that the things we can see, smell, taste, and touch are in a certain sense sacramental signs, visible realities housing invisible truths. In a certain sense, everything is a sacrament. Nature itself is a book that speaks of God.”

Craig’s this-world and otherworldly images are so fused that the two parts cannot be separated, providing light and meaning to daily experience. Having emerged from these collections, the reader walks through an illumined world. The poems of Every Tongue Confess are equally filled with saints and ordinary people and include those who are both. It enlarges both the place and the vision to locate saints in it and, in fact, pulls in people and events from literature, history, the Bible, myth, as well as obscure and well-known places, and yet the theme is always the same: the transforming power of grace.

The title comes from Philippians. According to the New Standard American Bible, its source reads: “For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11). The title is not what some take it to be—suggesting not “May every tongue confess” but “Every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.” Jesus will be acknowledged, willy-nilly. It is an announcement, not a plea. Thus, the poems project their rock-hard faith.

The prosody is unusual for Craig. Usually his collections represent a variety of forms, from free verse to replication of Biblical cadence to sonnets. These poems follow the same form, a flexible iambic pentameter presented in tercets that gives a nod to the experimental ghazals of Robert Bly. The effect is one of compactness. The tercets become reflections that are both separate and connected. This form is especially appropriate to Craig, whose thoughts explore the gamut of the universe—and beyond—often in a single poem. He finds electric connections between unlikely things. This is evident even in the titles, such as “St. Eudalia and the Barcelona Variations,” “Nikos Kazantzakis and the Donkeys of West Virginia,” “The Soul is in Love with the Nightly Movement of Snails,” and “Table Nineteen at the Criminal’s Wedding.” The book sent me to Google numerous times (Saint who? What exactly did Miriam do? She had something to do with Moses, right?) but I did not seriously need to have the information to get into the poems.

The movement of some of the poems is from disarray toward peace, but not the peace that comes from order and ease—rather the peace that comes from acceptance of apparent chaos as part of the divine plan. Others explore the meaning of art as a medium for approaching divinity. There is a lot of art in these poems, specific artists and works as well as the act of creating art itself. One might think Craig was participating in the ancient argument between iconoclasts and iconophiles. And indeed, he is—he implies it is part of the divine duty for artists to create art, in whatever form they are led to work.

What appeals to me most is the texture of faith in Craig’s poems. The everyday, complete with its setbacks and joys, is illuminated by realization of grace. The poems share the feeling that faith permeates everything, and only sometimes needs to be identified...