That which the whole world cannot contain.(Book Review)

Corpus, by Michael Symmons Roberts; Cape Poetry, 2004, $31.95.

Damnatio Memoriae, by Sebastian Barker; Enitharmon Press, 2004, about $35.

THREE YEARS AGO, writing in the Times, Michael Symmons Roberts analysed the achievement of the neglected British poet David Jones, stating that "Jones regarded his artistic and poetic vocation as a kind of priesthood". Jones, a Roman Catholic who was praised in his lifetime as a major poet by Eliot, Yeats, Auden and Stravinsky, receives little scholarly attention these days and his works are difficult to find in bookstores, yet his influence on British poetry is profound and can be discerned in the work of Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and Roberts himself. In fact, Roberts' decision to write about Jones says a great deal about the "priestly" nature of Roberts' own quest. If one examines some of Jones' more famous utterances on the relationship of art and sacrament, it becomes clear why.

Jones believed that what he called our "modern technocracy"--the heir of Enlightenment rationalism which condemns humankind's religious dimension to the catacombs--"more than any other age tends to disembody man". In Epoch and Artist, Jones contrasted the modern epoch's relegation of the body (by which, following a Manichean logic, what one does with and to the body is seen as irrelevant) with a traditional Christian view in which "the body is not an infirmity but a unique benefit and splendour; a thing denied to angels and unconscious in animals. We are committed to the body and by the same token we are committed to Ars, so to sign and sacrament." "Theology," he went on, "regards the body as a unique good."

The title of Roberts' latest collection, Corpus, indicates that, like his exemplar, this young British poet is increasingly situating his work in a broader philosophical conversation about the mystery of embodiment, a conversation which has involved names as diverse as those of social historian Michel Foucault, feminist Susan Bordo, semanticist Mark Johnston and Pope John Paul II.

"This is my body", begins both the poems "Corpse" and "Post-Mortem", recalling those words by which, in Catholic belief, Christ makes himself present "under the signs" of bread and wine. The whole collection is permeated with interchangeable images of sacred and profane bodies and food, demonstrating that the credal belief in the body's resurrection is as true for this poet as the "death of God" is for most of his contemporaries:

 
   This is my body, me on the slab, 
   Lying in the sun which burns 
   As if to melt the etched frost 
   From the man-tall windows. 
 
   In this swelter, how can flies 
   Resist the game, the deep red 
   Sweetmeats in the cavern of me, 
   Vascular stamens of a Venus trap?