Counting the Black Angels: POEMS (Illinois Poetry (Paperback)) - Softcover

Roberts, Len

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252063813 ISBN 13: 9780252063817

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1994

Synopsis

         "Len Roberts is a poet of unwavering truthfulness and unwavering
        mercy," commented Sharon Olds about Black Wings, a 1988 National
        Poetry Series selection. Counting the Black Angels, Roberts's eighth
        book of poetry, is a piercingly painful and redemptive work in which he
        probes memories of a violent family history and his covenants with God
        and the "Black Angels."
      "Roberts's new work is among the most intelligent, moving, and expressive
        poetry now being written."
        -- Hayden Carruth
 

About this title

From the Back Cover

'Len Roberts is a poet of unwavering truthfulness and unwavering mercy, ' commented Sharon Olds about Black Wings, a 1988 National Poetry Series selection. Counting the Black Angels, Robert's eighth book of poetry, is a piercingly painful and redemptive work in which he probes memories of a violent family history and his covenants with God and the 'Black Angels.'

Reviews

In these reflections on childhood and family, Roberts ( Sweet Ones ) writes of Catholic schooling and its effect on life in language that remains matter-of-fact and conversational. The black angels, a focus of potential and actual sin, enter the lives of Roberts and his family: two brothers and his father (a road man for a bread company) and mother, a textile stitcher. Many of the poems recreate parochial school, as in "The Way of the Cross" with its "twenty-two eleven-year-olds lifting heavy crosses of air onto our shoulders, / balancing them there as we staggered around the empty seats." In "Emma in the Class on Reproduction" a Sister stares "at easy Emma / who spread her knees at lunch and showed her underpants." Adolescence is endowed permanently with power by the sexuality in poems such as "This and That," "Love on Lonesome Drive Road," and "Learning Natural Instincts." Another theme Roberts develops is his relationship with his father, a drunk, and with his mother, who is unfaithful to his father. There are strong poems about each, particularly "He's Alone" and "The Cowboy," but the pain he feels in regard to his mother is less well delineated. In fact, Roberts fails to explore fully what sin is for him. Instead, he sometimes blames himself for being alive. In the powerful "Killing Jesus" he is in class, and at the same time imagines himself with the lance at the Crucifixion. Here and elsewhere, insight is winnowed from self-accusation, rescued by the strengths of his craft.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Roberts moves on from the tight focus on his own dysfunctional family that made Dangerous Angels so harrowing. But, as the black angels of his new collection's title suggest, he doesn't move very far. His drunken father, philandering mother, and mad older brother are still around, but often as mere shades and figures ancillary to his primary concerns in most of these poems--his Catholic school days, especially those of newly sex-obsessed adolescence. The school poems and others teem with the dire religious imagery and guilt his schooling inculcated in him and are so vivid and compelling they make you wonder, first, why Roberts doesn't write a memoir or a novel and, then, since aura and episodes are what stay with us longest from a novel, why anyone bothers writing novels about their Catholic school days when guys like Roberts write such juicy, convincing, directly engaging poems about them. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252063813
• ISBN 13: 9780252063817
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128