God's Loud Hand

If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams—the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake—it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs. In the poems of God’s Loud Hand , Cherry conducts—often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devo