The Habit of Poetry:
The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America
by nick ripatrazone
fortress, 125 pages, $28.99
Nick Ripatrazone’s small new book, The Habit of Poetry, makes a large contribution to Catholic cultural history. He documents the lives and works of literary nuns with special chapters on four women from the mid-twentieth century. Each of these sisters published in national journals and authored numerous books; none of them is widely remembered today. Ripatrazone’s study not only fills a gap in the history of American poetry; his readable and well-researched book makes a lively case for the continuing relevance of their legacy.
Perhaps the finest of the four poets was the earliest, Jessica Powers (1905–1988), a Discalced Carmelite. Born in rural Wisconsin, Powers had a compelling literary vocation but spent her youth caring for her ailing family. Finally, she managed to escape the farm for New York, where she immersed herself in its vibrant Catholic literary life and published her first book. In 1941 she returned to Wisconsin to enter the Carmelite monastery in Milwaukee. A year later she received the habit and became Sr. Miriam of the Holy Spirit. Powers published steadily until her death, though two terms as prioress and persistent tuberculosis slowed her productivity. Her poems are lyrical, direct, and luminously spiritual.
I am old enough to remember Ripatrazone’s second writer, Franciscan Sr. Mary Bernetta Quinn (1915–2003), as a formidable presence in the literary world. Not only did the library of my Catholic high school have several of her books; so did the local public library. Her poems and essays appeared in major journals. She was so well regarded that Yale acquired her archive, which included her correspondence with Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Her verse has not aged well, but her critical studies of modern poetry remain engaging.
How good that Ripatrazone remembers Maura Eichner (1915–2009) of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Sr. Maura was not only a poet but a brilliant teacher of creative writing. During her forty-nine years at Notre Dame of Maryland, a small women’s college, her students won so many literary awards that her classes became newsworthy. (Under her guidance, her young authors took 297 prizes and nine first-places in The Atlantic’s annual competitions alone.) “One writes poetry,” she observed, “in order to find God.” Her teaching, however, used poetry to help several generations of young women become confident and articulate.
Catholic nuns are challenging subjects for biography. Once they have taken vows, their outer lives often appear staid and uneventful. It is easy to underestimate the depth and diversity of their intellectual and spiritual lives, which are mostly internal and therefore invisible. “You have brought me here to show me a secret thing,” begins a poem by Quinn. The line could be the motto for many poet-nuns.
In such a circumspect tradition, one understands why Madeline DeFrees (1919–2015) especially engages Ripatrazone’s attention. She is the only one of his poets who left religious life, part of the huge defection of religious in the aftermath of Vatican II, when approximately half of U.S. nuns left their orders. DeFrees had joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary at sixteen, becoming Sr. Mary Gilbert. She left the convent in 1967 to teach creative writing (in secular dress) at the University of Montana. Six years later, she was released from her vows to continue her literary career. Her later poems and letters provide a candid account of her inner life, which would have been impossible in a convent. In one poem, comparing herself to a ventriloquist’s dummy, she wrote, “I was tired of being / a mouthpiece, the body stuffed with sawdust.”
Reading about these lively sisters, I wondered if Ripatrazone realized he had a potential bestselling sequel on his hands—Healthy Habits: Literary Nuns and Longevity. The life expectancy of an American woman born in 1915 was fifty-four years. DeFrees lived to ninety-five, Eichner ninety-four, and Quinn eighty-eight. Afflicted by tuberculosis since early adulthood, Powers nonetheless reached eighty-three. The literary nun lifestyle appears to be as salubrious for this life as the next one.
The Habit of Poetry is a compact book. The text runs just under a hundred pages (followed by thirty pages of helpful notes and bibliography). Nonetheless, it is an important and original volume. It recovers a lost tradition in Catholic letters. It restores the voices of religious women who played a huge role in American literary education. Ripatrazone has demonstrated that “in an increasingly secular world, skilled and inspired work from religious poets can still shine.” This book should be in every Catholic high school, seminary, and university library.
—Dana Gioia
In the Courts of Three Popes:
An American Lawyer and Diplomat in the Last Absolute Monarchy of the West
by mary ann glendon
image, 240 pages, $27
Were it a normal memoir, Mary Ann Glendon’s In the Courts of Three Popes would be worth reading for its swift history of a prominent Harvard law professor’s decades of service to the Vatican. In fact, the book defies the conventions of its genre and becomes a more affecting and, in a way, sobering apologetic.
A cradle Catholic, Glendon grew up with “rather romanticized ideas of faraway Rome.” When she landed amid the Vatican bureaucracy during the middle stages of her career, she woke up as “a stranger in a rather strange land—a layperson in a culture dominated by clergy, an American woman in an environment that was largely male and Italian, and a citizen of a constitutional republic in one of the world’s last absolute monarchies.”
In the papal courts of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, holiness and human frailty share the spotlight. Glendon appears grateful for the opportunities she was given—like taking on Hillary Clinton at the UN; proud of the work she and her colleagues were able to accomplish—like when, for example, she served as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See; but also candid about the clerical infighting and institutional dysfunction swirling around her.
Ultimately, Three Popes is a cri de cœur to the laity, whose faith and professional know-how the Church desperately needs to carry out its postconciliar process of aggiornamento—but who also must lend time and talent with eyes wide-open. In the modern era, church administration and management are heavy crosses, not feel-good résumé padders.
Given the internal and external challenges that currently beset the Church, it is only natural that some Catholics might hear God’s call to serve and experience trepidation. For them, there are worse questions to ask than “What would Mary Ann Glendon do?”
—F. Cartwright Weiland
Art and Architecture of Sicily
by julian treuherz
lund humphries, 320 pages, $79.99
In his celebrated novel The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has his main character lament that while Sicily has borne the weight of other great civilizations, it never created one of its own. Julian Treuherz sets out to prove Lampedusa wrong in this survey of Sicilian art. It’s true that Sicily has produced no artistic genius on par with other European cities and states, but it has made cultural forms and artistic styles its own to great effect.
Due to its location as a crossroads of the Mediterranean, Sicily has been a colony of many empires, beginning with the Greeks. Their temples at Agrigento and Segesta are some of the finest in the world and date from the fifth century b.c. Centuries later, after devastating earthquakes in the eastern part of Sicily, great churches and palaces were built in the joyful, theatrical style of the baroque. Sicilian baroque is characterized by marmi mischi, the extensive use of inlaid marble in arabesque and floral patterns, or marmi tramischi, the combination of flat and three-dimensional marble inlay. At the Jesuit Casa Professa in Palermo, the inlaid marble playfully teaches the faithful the core tenets of Catholic faith and morals. In the Oratorio del Rosario di Santa Cita, Giacomo Serpotta sculpted the Battle of Lepanto in mesmerizing detail.
Sicily’s greatest claim to a unique cultural style comes from the twelfth century, when its Christian and Muslim population came under Norman rule. Roger II’s Palatine Chapel in Palermo features Byzantine mosaics recounting the lives of Christ and the apostles—with inscriptions in Greek, Latin, and Arabic—capped by an Arabic ceiling with motifs from Islamic courtly life. The cathedral of Monreale outside Palermo is even grander, with more than 80,000 square feet of mosaic inside. The cathedral cloister has Arabic columns with Gothic vaults and capitals. Together, these temples and churches make Sicily a microcosm of Europe’s faith, cultural exchange, and artistic achievement.
—Nathaniel Peters
