In and Out

Chronicles a skeptical Protestant undergraduate at McGill University and his dealings with, and move away from, the Catholic church

This remarkable long poem is at once autobiography, confessional and spiritual quest. In witty, unrhymed, anapestic verse that affords the old-fashioned narrative pleasures of Pope or Horace, Hine paints himself as a precocious, confused, skeptical Protestant undergraduate; the time is 1955-56, and the setting McGill University in Montreal, where the author lurches in and out of the Catholic Church for reasons he dimly understands. Peppered with erotic wordplay, his monastic misadventures include a frank portrayal of homosexual love as well as ramblings on Oedipal fixations, sin, guilt, wisdom and the search for godhead. Hine, a poet, translator and former editor of Poetry magazine, writes unblushingly about his seesaw ambivalence over his half-hearted religious conversion; candor carries the poem, and we can easily forgive its excesses of schoolboy cleverness. His wonderfully sardonic portraits of college chums, church officials and of his fractured adolescent self give his ode the breadth of a novel.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This lengthy narrative poem, in unrhymed anapests loose enough to read as prose, relates a young man's coming of age at McGill University in the 1950s. His first erotic experiences, both homo- and heterosexual, are followed by betrayal and a search for identity. A skeptical Protestant, he drifts in and out of the Catholic Church, working in a soup kitchen, and then is drawn by "historical snobbery" to a Benedictine priory. The tone is tragicomic; the verse ranges from the precious"transpicuous groves/ of deciduous trees"to the witty"I would not be the first or the last/ to be led to the threshold of faith/ by philology." Hine adds, in hindsight, diatribes against the "vernacular gibberish" of Vatican II. For more scholarly collections. Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.