In The Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (ISBN 0811216136)

Exotic Bait for a Suburban Afternoon:
It was time for a new selection of Merton's poetry, and certainly this set can be safely recommended to those coming into an engagement with him. A liberal selection of some of Merton's very best poems are here, in a handsome volume with generally relevant introductory commentary. However, this selection misses the mark for various reasons. Most of all, neither Merton's entire poetic corpus, nor individual poems can be as readily tagged and filed as the editor attempts -- contemplative poems, historical subjects, "being human," and the like. And given the major directions of Merton's pioneer aesthetic, it is highly debatable whether they should be. He was one to cross and demolish categories, not erect them. Merton's early poems suggest an offshoot of, or an updated incarnation of Gerald Manley Hopkins, to make allowances for the more freewheeling engagement with both self and the world expected in a later 20th century voice. Thus three categories -- "from the monastery," "of the sacred," "of contemplation" esentially recycle and relabel material from the same well. Without doubt the selections are very good and represent important currents in Merton's poetry which never ceased. Yet by setting up the cloister as "base," the editors implicitly establish inside/outside monastery/world Cistersian/self dichotomies which for the most part of his life (except for a few years in the flush of solace early in his vocation), Merton not only rejected but quite determinedly attacked. Indeed this is his achievement. This attack was what the later experimental poetry extended. Merton was virtually alone as a Catholic or even a spiritual writer to delve into the modernist experimentalism of Pound and the early Eliot. This is what entitles him, if anything, to be considered a significant figure in 20th century poetry. Parts of those late experiments, which he called "antipoems" -- Cables to the Ace and Geography of Lograire -- are included here, to set this book apart from the earlier Selected Poems collection. It is a worthy aim, however since these works are long they are excerpted. Since, however strange, these poems have a hidden but tight unity, excerpting does not really work. The holes invisibly show, making the remainder that is published just look disjointed for the wrong reasons. What is really new in this set (at least for the general public) is the "being human" section -- which is one way to look at the poems to the so-called girlfriend (or what have you) known to Mertonphobes the world over sometimes as S, other times as M, but in any event wearing an official Merton industry scarlet letter worthy of a Hawthorne romance. Frankly, while the poems now finally largely revealed are not that bad, they are not really (as poems) all that good either. They look like they were dashed off about as fast as the much more successful "Kandy Express" in the Asian Journal. No, you can't fault Merton, either -- writing about love and passion is one thing, but writing out of conflicted, suppressed emotions certainly affected by existing vows (and a wink at posterity too, frankly) could not have helped. Well, one of them is just wonderful --"Never Call a Babysitter in a Thunderstorm" -- that is the voice of the "major poet" the introduction proclaims but which the set fails to adequately document and defend. The fact is, outside the insular World of Merton existing in various conferences, journals, and certain (hardly many) academic venues, this is a claim nowhere else recognized. The industry has essentially painted itself into a corner absurdly appropriate to Gertude Stein -- "Merton is major because he is major." Such absurdity of course would have been relished by the wild and playfully adept Merton who is largely AWOL here. He wrote a lot of quite humorous, even sardonic verse -- some absolutely wild -- which would have both buoyed and balanced this book as a collection. His lifelong pals were borderline beats before the beats even happened, and they stayed that way. Simply, both the selections and the introductory essays intoduce the poet with way too much hushed reverence. Who cares if he were a major poet? He was a damn refreshing one. One who really wants to know Merton the poet should simply break down and buy The Collected Poems and read it entire like a single work. That title is bs because of the New Directions rip-of playing games with the M (or is it S?) poems, but it's no big deal. Merton might have eventually destroyed them as he did with her letters (bear this in mind before rhapsodizing too much about his candor, deep love, or what have you). You see folks, he was a very slippery character with a knack for survival and escape learned early in tough reform school circumstances, as an orphan between the wars. When you finally meet him (to steal a line from a grand joke of a poem painfully missing here), "you are about to be surprised," and "You will find yourself sweetly insulted . . ." That may be a problem for you; maybe it should be. But in any event you will then meet Merton the poet and man, not the proto-idol of a quasi-guru which he would have certainly destroyed had he found it in his path.