Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions by David Stephen Calonne (review)

 Reviews (p. ). Having married and moved permanently to England, Eliot is reborn as the satirical and apocalyptic prophet of the Sweeney poems, e Waste Land, and finally ‘e Hollow Men’, which he told his brother was his only ‘blasphemous poem’ (p. ), since its subject is despair. is central period is treated in Chapters –, from which one comes with a fresh appreciation of the difficult ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ and of the ‘in-betweenness’ of ‘e Hollow Men’ (p. ). roughout her study, Brooker quotes from the Eliot texts recovered by recent editorial projects , which have been less studied because of their previous unavailability but also because Eliot’s major work is now nearly a century old, just as Don Juan was to the author of e Waste Land, and therefore much criticism has pursued other, more fashionable courses. Brooker’s book, on the other hand, is likely to be permanently useful. e Clark Lectures have been available for years, but it is again a shock to find Eliot telling his audience how spurious is John Donne’s ‘e Ecstasy’ (p. )—the term of comparison being inevitably Dante. is new asceticism is a prelude to Eliot’s second ‘conversion’, to Anglo-Catholicism, which Brooker considers in the light of his return to the USA in  and consequent disillusion and discovery of the impossibility of returning. is is shown to be the point of the opening passage of ‘Burnt Norton’ about ‘what might have been and what has been’ (Collected Poems – (London: Faber, ), p. ). Illusion and negation are present dialectically in the hesitant yet affirmative war Quartets (Chapters –), where no statement is final and yet Eliot is able, with the help of Dante, Augustine, and the quasi-heretical Julian of Norwich, to offer a glimpse of an ultimately satisfying theodicy. U  S  G M B Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions. By D S C. London: Bloomsbury. . ix+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. What to do with the uncategorizable? In an increasingly tagable, cell-filling, algorithm-based world, the question poses problems not just for the librarian, the teacher, the publisher, and other canon-makers, but also for the reader whose mind may not be readily apt to a constantly unfolding, barely graspable, holistic appreciation of a person—let alone that person’s life work. David Stephen Calonne addresses the complexity of such a pursuit as a sort of side project to this monograph ’s larger work: that of sharing the ‘hidden religions’ of Diane Di Prima’s ‘visionary poetics’, attributing it oen to a truly ‘creative’ sensibility (p. ). is is an in-depth study of an explicitly, intentionally untraceable poetics; it challenges its readers further by offering encyclopedic glosses of difficult, complex thoughtsystems . Calonne has made a career of single-author studies, and in this new contribution to his analysis of Beat poets, he does not offer the whole, finished picture which a novice reader might require; rather, he embarks on an intense MLR, .,   and sometimes hurried journey through systems of thought, religions, figures, life choices, and politics. At times, Calonne rattles through series of punctuationless lines, because a sort of magic is at stake in the discussion. However, there is a risk that the poetry itself gets le behind. Like many studies with ‘poetics’ in their title, this work on Di Prima focuses on the unfolding of a philosophy rather than a poetry. Close readings oen yield to narratives, timelines, and diary entries. is is especially true in Chapters  and , but the whole book showcases excerpts of Di Prima’s prose, perhaps even more than her poetry. Di Prima was in conversation with so many various forms of art and artists, yet consistently chose poetry as her medium. Chapter , for example, situates her physically within a New York scene, drawing connections both professional and situational between her and the poets, artists, musicians, and dancers she associated with on various levels, but it does not necessarily read the forms or implications of their aesthetics into hers. Rather, what this book does is show an arc of personal and philosophical growth, recording the power—dense, layered, rich, suggestive—of the various fields of resonance in...