Book Review: St. Peter's B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints

Abstract

St. Peter's B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints. Edited by Mary Ann B. Miller. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 2014. xxii + 288 pp. $15.95 (paper).Can the lives of the saints, and the mythologies that have grown up around them, teach us even today how to live-how to love, to bear suffering, to transcend the mundane, to help and heal others, and ultimately to die? In a great variety of ways, the poems in St. Peter's B-list explore this question. 'The lives of saints are writes James Martin, sj in the afterword, and the many perspectives and styles represented in the anthology certainly support this notion, as saintly narratives are subjectively experienced and interpreted by the poets. All of the poems seem to acknowledge a great divide between the stories about saints imparted to us in childhood and the realities of living in the world as we know it, although the stories provide a meta-narrative of self-sacrificial compassion. While the saints represent an ideal toward which to strive, the poets find that miracles and transcendence remain unavailable to them, and they are left to weather the vicissitudes of life without extraordinary divine intervention.The tonal and ideological range of the poems in this anthology is wide, encompassing reverence and irreverence, devotion and apostasy, curiosity and apathy, humor and sincerity. While the saints of this anthology are limited to those of the Roman Catholic tradition, most of the poems included will likely be accessible and pertinent to non-Catholics-and often even to the non-religious. To this end, a helpful appendix summarizing the lives of each saint mentioned in the poems is included. Admittedly, a number of mediocre poems are included, but these are punctuated by striking poems that stand out like fresh light bulbs in a string of sputtering ones. Many of the mediocre poems are simply prosaic and dull, although a few are more spectacularly so-sparking and crackling to their demise, at least putting on some kind of linguistic fireworks before fizzling out. more successful poems, such as Susan Blackwell Ramseys The Story I Like Best about Saint Teresa-effectively recognize humor and humanity in the stories of the saints, demonstrating that whatever sainthood might mean, it does not mean a state of sterile and perfect spirituality:The story I like best about Saint Teresa[...]is not the one of Teresa stuck in mudaxel-deep on her way to try to haulsome convent full of fashionable widowstoward reform, drenched, the pretty spitfireshouting at the clouds If this is the wayyou treat your friends, no wonder you have so few! …