What is redeemed by life?

David Harrity’s Finishing Line chapbook, Morning & What Has Come Since (2007), contains a jewel of a sonnet “Hail Mary in the Courtyard,” which seem to me to cut to the heart of Harrity’s work here. Standing before the statue, the speaker asks:

. . . I wonder if your words
fall like marbles from the pocket of some
boy, roll into the burnt grass, never found.

This sonnet follows a long, multi-part poem entitled “Prayers for the City” which begins

This place is a blanket of sound.
How can we pray? How can we pray?

and ends

City you are loved,
      city, you are loved,
             city, you are loved
                        so I lift my voice
                                  to keep asking what you cannot.

Harrity’s poems wrestle with faith in a way that harks back, not to Donne — whose work really seems to me to be all about Donne and how clever he can be — but to Herbert and Hopkins.

In “October Psalm”

I ask the words I cannot pray.
I ask again—what is redeemed
by my living?

Although I find the poems a little uneven — as what poets are not? — I invite you to keep an eye on Harrity and to take a look at this chapbook, which was nominated for a Pushcart and a Kentucky Literary Award.

Possibly related posts:

Donne on Sunday

All my people

The life of a broken bough

Donne on Sunday

Donne on Sunday

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