Depth Theology: Poems

by Peter O'Leary

Depth Theology taps the religious potential of poetry to access both the interior and the exterior worlds. Inspired by depth psychology, the field of psychology devoted to the unconscious, Peter O'Leary's poems work to discover the religious knowledge of the unconscious mind. While seeking a revelatory poetry, O'Leary engages the inconclusive quality of the revealed, observing that "There's / a liquidy trickiness to life, an entropy / of spillage." The religious imagination that evolves in this series of thirty-four poems is unclouded by dogma and richly colored by erudition, while it tests the limits of human language and experience in an effort to understand our inwardness. Overflowing with images of birds and other objects of day-to-day experience, interwoven with the mythic, allegorical, and biblical, Depth Theology charts a path to understanding our innermost worlds. From "Lux Contemplatio": "there is no place anymore for us to migrate. The need / yet remains. / Antarctica means now an interior domain. Curiosity / about our inner life increases. A nomad's desert God is an inward / generator. Our outward movement yields our soul's circumincession / its insitting / in rotation with the divine abeyance"

Genres: Poetry, Religion

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Born in Detroit, 1968. Raised in Grosse Pointe Park, a suburb of Detroit,
educated in public schools there & then in a Catholic high school, De
LaSalle Collegiate, taught by the LaSallean Christian Brothers. Post-
secondary education at the University of Chicago, the College, earning
an AB in English literature in 1990, albeit with a one-year stint at Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, to study poetry (with poet & classicist Jim
Powell). Three years of wage-slavery followed: eighteen months at a
correspondence high school on the South Side of Chicago, another
eighteen as a researcher at the City Colleges of Chicago. In 1993 began
studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, earning a
Master of Arts in Divinity in 1994 & a PhD in Divinity, specializing in
Religion & Literature, in 1999. In the midst of this, some movement:
notably, a period traveling in Greece in 1994, including a visit to the holy
island of Patmos where Orthodox iconography was discovered & a year
spent living in Vienna in 1997-8, where coffee & opera were discovered.
More notably & somewhat earlier, epistolary contact with poet Ronald
Johnson was initiated in 1992, followed by a few valuable meetings in
San Francisco. Mentored by RJ until his death, in 1998. Not before being
asked by the ailing poet to be his literary executor. This charge has
resulted in three books: To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems (Talisman
House, 2000, The Shrubberies, a collection of last poems (Flood
Editions, 2001), and a reprinting of Radi os (Flood, 2005). As well as various archival tasks, ongoing. So far, two books of poetry: Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) & Depth Theology (Georgia, 2006). Also one critical book, Gnostic Contagion:
Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan, 2002). Since late
2001, following eighteen months in St. Louis, residency in Berwyn, a
working-class suburb on the west side of Chicago, in a house, with wife,
Rebecca Houze, an art historian, & two sons, Gabriel & Lucian. Teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator of Peter O'Leary's Depth Theology identifies himself in the second poem as among "a latter-day theic (religion-addicted) species (who) quavers | at revelation & absconds, a desistor with scintillant | aura." The "aura" is as one with certain forms of migraine, however the narrator Orphically interprets these neuro-physical phenomenon as "God visits the cranial shell in fireworks," "footraces the fissures | loosening the seams with epiphany." The little boat by which American solipsism in its lyric form is known better batten down the hatches. What if our inwardness had a lexicon, and it was traditional -- indeed, traditionally religious? That is, what if our disciplines, our subcultures, our communal shorthand was just a "real" and no one more so than another? Now, perhaps, "the world is made of the joining of stellar ash . . . | There it hung in a jesuitical dope of space." The mixing registers of diction catch you up; reading our own inwardness in O'Leary we pass over into a confidently plausible receptibility toward patterns of spiritual awareness.

O'Leary is a humanist in the old-fashioned sense of one who starts from faith and tries to expand and deepen the awareness of the faith-community. That is, he's a Catholic humanist with Hellenic tropes. When he's describing his project within the poems he's a traditional modernist and at times his focus on the how can lead his readers astray from the why: "Potential energy is a farce of gravity. Kinesis | speeds an aging Gremlin across the country. A Bug too." The wit within and around our American demotic is conversationally engaging, but when the conversation gets round to Moby-Dick and On the Road we begin to suspect the expansivist is apologizing. It's the speed and barbarity of O'Leary's intelligence that is in focus here; in terms of his craft, the "potential energy" of our identification with the narrator is all the critical gravity he needs.

It's that expansiveness, joined with lyric intensity, that makes Depth Theology so gorgeous. The intensity has come from O'Leary's conversational mastery -- his breathtaking cognitive hurtles across the sentence's fissures of sense. But for those of us outside the faith-community, it's the expansiveness which is the news. This is on every account an extraordinary book.

[C Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

What strange error of hilarity in the world made O'Leary?

[Berit · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first felt I was wrestling with the density and erudition of this collection. Can a poem (or its reader) have space to breathe amidst such deeply referential undergrowth?

But space opened up in the last of the three books that compose this collection. Cranes, celestial bodies, parasites...

[Jamie Dougherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.
Favorites:
Gravity as the combine of light through time
An Auspex
This strange & uncanny process of crystalization
A supersenual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water
With more passionate flying
Somnia
The revival of the religious sciences
The rosetta stone for birdcalls
Celan
Book of giants
Three words out of dante
Theophanies

[Aaron Bauer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dense. It has a lot of esoteric references to religious texts and people in most the major world religions, but primarily focuses on Christianity and the elusiveness of God. But it has some really gorgeous thoughts at times.