Gerard Manley Hopkins (Guide to the Year's Work‪)‬

Although only one new full-length book largely devoted to Hopkins has reached my reviewer's desk this year, I find it highly worthy. Written by a New Zealander who was partly educated in Scotland and has now published his work with an Anglo-American press, Tim McKenzie's Vocation in the Poetry of the Priest-Poets George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and R. S. Thomas (Edwin Mellen, 2003) comes with no special advance fanfares and none of the resultant high expectations those fanfares might produce. Yet the book proves teeming with information and insight (the author includes large amounts of helpful detail, for example, concerning both Protestant and Roman Catholic sacerdotal and Christological traditions [pp.7-46, 185-230]). Meanwhile, McKenzie seems exceptionally engaged in his investigations, despite those investigations' considerable weight--involving the poetic canons and ideational schema of three complex poets, in three very different historical eras. In fulfilling so well his strenuous intellectual goals, McKenzie enlightens us enormously. First, he explores the many dimensions of Herbert's Reformation-era, Bible-centered pastoral approach--as this approach affected both Herbert's life at the chancel altar and his labors at his writing desk. Next, McKenzie shows us just how consistently Hopkins committed himself--through theological theory and (far more importantly) through strenuous priestly service and poetic meditation--to a "desperate, decisive" sacramental "affirmation" of "cosmic and personal coherence ... in and through Christ" (p. 19). And, finally, McKenzie introduces us to the intriguing modern Welsh poet R. S. Thomas--whose constant questionings of his priestly function and its interrelationship with his poetic art expressed far more consistent doubts about such issues than did the laments voiced by Hopkins.