Theophobia

by Bruce Beasley

Theophobia is the latest volume in Bruce Beasley's ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called "Pilgrim's Deviations" and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley seeks the Biblical Kingdom of God among Dolly the cloned sheep, the wonders and horrors of extremophilic creatures living in astonishing intensities of temperature, robotic phone operators, and Wikipedia's explanation of the mysteries of the Holy Spirit.
Bruce Beasley is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The Corpse New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007). He has won fellowships from the NEA and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart Prizes.
Finalist for The Washington State Book Award
One of Poetry Northwest's Notable Books of 2014

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2012

Reviews

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books I tried reading when I first bought it, four or five years ago, and struggled through the first 60 pages without understanding or appreciating much of anything. Picked it back up this week and read it with my morning coffee, and loved every bit of it, even the ones that were still difficult. I kept flipping back to reread previous poems out loud again. Here's a bit from one of my favorites, the (Vocation) section in Genomic Vanitas.

Like the irritable
switching of a medley, melody
blended & disarranged, interrupted
into scramble & impatient merge:
the lability of these helices,
exon & intron, code & junk.

Can’t we say
anymore, with Descartes, the soul
can work independently of the brain,
can we say anymore, with Descartes,
ignoramus et ignorabimus, we are ignorant
and shall so remain?

Tell me, snipped thread, warped ladder,
what it is you say I am.
Nucleus-cosmographer, hymn me
the six-billion-lettered song of self.

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could have, I would have taken more classes from Bruce. Rarest of humans who can teach and write extraordinarily beautiful poems.

Favorite poem:
The Scale by Which the Mapped Concerns the Map

1. We are the map's icons, the clot-black or gray hyphen-lines, the capital's isolate circled star.
The key
boxed underneath
in the smallest font will tell
us exactly what it is we mean

to stand for.

Also delighted to no end to learn the word, Scatomancer: one who performs divination by examining of animal feces

[ben adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited about this book based on its title and apparent subject matter, but it ended up being too awash with technical language and obscurities. The poems feel fragmented and lack direction despite their frequently poignant titles. Maybe I just do not appreciate postmodern poetics, but this feels more like disconnected ideas strung together than statements strung together to convey a cogent idea. Nevertheless, there are parts of this book that are incredible and beautiful. I would recommend this to anyone interested in science and faith, particularly their aesthetics.