NYT reviews Anterooms

A very nice review from David Orr:

More than 50 years ago, Randall Jarrell claimed that as a poet, Wilbur "never goes too far, but he never goes far enough." The observation is invariably quoted whenever Wilbur gets reviewed (far be it from me to break the chain). But to write convincingly about death — and also, as Wilbur has increasingly done, about grief — isn't a matter of "going" anywhere. It's a matter of remaining poised in the face of a vast and freezing indifference. And while the strong, spare poems here are unlikely to strike many readers as the illustrious pronouncements of a Grand Old Man — the kind of figure Jarrell had in mind — they are wholly successful in meeting the darkest of subjects with their own quiet light. Which is, surely, a far grander thing.

I had been afraid that my reading of "A Measuring Worm" was just the residue of my inarticulate interpretation of Fish's review of True Grit and the incomplete reflection on The Road. I guess a fear of "a vast and freezing indifference" hangs over all of it anyway. It calls to mind this from Joseph Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity:

If he who seeks to preach the faith is sufficiently self-critical, he will soon notice that it is not only a question of form, of the kind of dress in which theology enters upon the scene. In the strangeness of theology's aims to the men of our time, he who takes his calling seriously will clearly recognize not only the difficulty of the task of interpretation but also the insecurity of his own faith, the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe. (41)