ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996              TAG: 9609100011
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: 4    EDITION: METRO 

BOOK PAGE

BOOKMARKS

Major American poet to read at Roanoke College

Reviewed by SARAH MILLER

FATE'S KITE: Poems, 1991-1995. Louisiana State University Press. $10.95.

How much imagery can you pack into a 13-line poem? Dave Smith's latest collection of poetry, "Fate's Kite: Poems 1991-1995," shows us. Densely weaving language and subject in a sensuous web of experience, observation and reflection, Smith explores an amazingly wide range of topics in a series of short poems.

Several of the poems focus on youth, the "Boys in the Square at Bologna" who "preen in the square's mouth, indolents" and the "leggy blonde" at the tennis court, but the narrator clearly speaks with the authority that comes with age. This poet belongs to the group of "You old guys," as the blonde tells him during a tennis match. It is the voice of a mature poet.

Smith's poems travel, as well, through the Ireland of "Glendalough's Round Tower," aboard the "Train to St. Andrews, Scotland," to the James River in "Canary Weather in Virginia." These poems reveal a mind acutely aware of place and persons, a poet able to condense the journeys of his life into single moments. "I got off last, in wind. 'Smith?' my contact wailed./Whiskey, fire. Dawn-fronts, the train's shuddering lyric."

"Fate's Kite" takes the reader along those journeys, too. In poems that find significance in as small an item as the water pitchers "stacked in tall edgy ranks in the Garden place/ at K-Mart," Dave Smith's latest collection shows enormous breadth of stylistic achievement coupled with depth of observation. It is a remarkable book, one to savor poem by poem, even line by line. "Fate's Kite" is not just the latest publication, but the latest achievement, of this important American poet.

Sarah Miller teaches writing and English literature at Roanoke College.

Dave Smith, co-editor of the Southern Review, will give a poetry reading on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Antrim Chapel at Roanoke College. The public is invited.

He will also give a public reading on Friday at 7 p.m. at the University Volume Two Bookstore in University Mall, Blacksburg.

Are the Gospels older than previously assumed?

Reviewed by WILLIAM R. KLEIN

EYEWITNESS TO JESUS. By Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D'Ancona. Doubleday. $23.95.

It is widely accepted among modern biblical scholars that the Gospels were written late in the first century, the earliest being Mark, written at least 40 years after the events it records. In recent decades certain more liberal scholars have suggested that this long hiatus between Jesus' ministry and the formation of our present Gospels opened the door to a misrepresentation of Jesus as he really was. Increasingly these scholars have argued that during this hiatus, oral and written tradition transformed Jesus from a simple teacher of personal and social righteousness into the divine figure of Christian theology. The implications are that the Gospels are not wholly trustworthy, and that the "real" Jesus probably never claimed to be either the Christ or God's Son.

Now comes a book that argues that the Gospel According to Matthew was written, not 50 or 60 years later, but shortly after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection while eyewitnesses were still alive.

A papyrus fragment from Chapter 26 of Matthew's Gospel was found in Luxor, Egypt, in 1901 by the Rev. Charles B. Huleatt, a British missionary, who sent it to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Oxford University. There it lay in a corner of the college's library, largely ignored for almost a century until Professor Carsten Peter Thiede, director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, Germany, came upon it. Thiede's expertise is in the evolution of ancient writing and the new science of papyrology: the intricate study and dating of ancient papyrus documents. Thiede, whose book also sheds new scientific light on the Dead Sea Scrolls, argues that this Magdalene Fragment, as it is now known, is the oldest extant New Testament document we have and consequently "one of the most important documents in the world." If his conclusions are valid, then many of the assumptions of the modern, liberal biblical establishment are called into question, thus opening up a whole new direction for biblical research. And what is more, science, long hailed by fundamentalists and obscurantists as the enemy of religion, is now engaged as a possible servant of the ancient faith of the church.

Thiede and his associate Matthew d'Ancona tell a fascinating story of the fragment's discovery and subsequent dating. Especially provocative to this reviewer is the revolutionary challenge this discovery may pose of the orthodoxies of much academic scholarship that has divorced itself from the faith of the church.

The Rev. William R. Klein is| retired minister of Second Presbyterian Church.

Famous poet a narcissist

Reviewed by DABNEY STUART

ROBERT FROST, A BIOGRAPHY. By Jeffrey Meyers. Houghton Mifflin. $30.

Robert Frost's biographers began their labor as far back as 1926 when Frost, who lived to be 88, was a tender 42. They have not fared well. Three of them died before they could complete their work. The last of these, Lawrence Thompson, had to suppress significant material and his book has been largely discredited because of its alleged bias. Leon Edel, Henry James' biographer, said that Thompson was "ready to arraign his subject as arrogant, jealous, resentful, sulky, vindictive, and addicted to tempers and rages." Jeffrey Meyers says his current entry into the fray "attempts to see Frost whole, without suppressions and ... rancor." He largely succeeds, but not without presenting again a strong case for Edel's description.

Much of what Meyers documents is familiar: the distinction between Frost's public "hayseed" persona and the more complex and cunning private man; the energy that Frost's public appearances drained from his composition of poems; the allusive layering of his apparently "simple" work; the discrepancy between his lifelong repudiation of academe and his lifelong dependency upon it; the exorbitant cost his wife and children paid for his career. Meyers makes all this coherently accessible in his narrative, fleshing it out with anecdote, remembrance and interpretive comment from a variety of sources.

Frost's famous sense of poetry as competition, for instance, is focused in his statement that "There's room for only one person at a time ... at the top of the steeple ... [and] I always meant that person to be me." About Frost's public image Stanley Kunitz remarked that "his most successful work of the imagination was the legend he created about himself." Frost's ability to provide incisive comment on himself surfaces occasionally; when his more traditional colleagues at Amherst College criticized his teaching, he remarked, "Always I was under suspicion of the old-timers that I was dodging work. I was. I responded [only] if something interested me."

Frost's son-in-law thought the troubles of Frost's offspring stemmed from their early lack of contact with normal children and from their hermetic world as young people: "His career had been hard on his children. They had been pushed too much in the background."

After his wife Elinor's death in 1938, Frost was to come to a similar judgment, seeing that his family had "paid dearly for his extraordinary success." Disoriented by Elinor's death, Frost wrote in a letter, "[I have] prospered in an outrageously self-indulgent life. I have been given absolutely my own way." Meyers' book substantiates this view.

This fascinating biography of a distressed, difficult man who wrote some of the best poetry an American has yet composed, raises old, imponderable questions. Why does it seem that art and life need to be at odds with one another and that one must therefore be sacrificed for the other? The imbalance in Frost's life was excruciating, and it is interestingly presented here.

In order, however, for the predicament to be effectively dramatized, the poems need as shrewd an elucidation as the life. Meyers falls short in this area. His commentaries are summary and obvious. Meyers' approach to the poems will be helpful to readers unfamiliar with Frost's work, but it doesn't give a convincing sense of the greatness for which Frost seems to have sacrificed so much. There is little sense of what makes the poems great as poems, reminding us that this isn't a critical biography.

The material which Lawrence Thompson had to suppress in his truncated three-volume work concerns Frost's affair with his secretary, Morrison, whom many of the poems in Frost's last good book were about. This section of Meyers' volume, then, contains previously unpublished material, much of it owed to notes Thompson left behind. Morrison's daughter also contributed to this newly available aspect of Frost's last 25 years. Meyers presents it with skill and compassion, uncompromisingly.

In a book done with such care and engagement it seems churlish to cite difficulties. The footnoting, however, is at best imprecise and becomes a source of frustration after a while. Meyers also pushes unconvincingly for the particular "influences" of other poets he thinks he finds in Frost's work. It is notable, finally, that the word narcissist appears nowhere in the biography of a classic example of the type.

Dabney Stuart's latest volume is "Second Sight: Poems for Paintings by Carroll Cloar," which was reviewed on this page by Barbara Dickinson on April 7.

Author stars as a reader

CRUISING PARADISE: TALES BY SAM SHEPARD.

Read by Sam Shepard. Random House Audiobooks. Unabridged. $16.

Sam Shepard won a Pulitzer Prize as a playwright, but he is also known as an actor, musician and writer. His storytelling ability is evident in these 20 short tales, but what makes them stand out is the reading itself. Each tale is more vignette than story; in fact, because his conclusions are not always conclusive, the demarcation between stories isn't always clear. The true subject lies in the telling rather than the content. Shepard stars as a reader, and these two cassettes are worth having just to hear his various voices.

- MARY ANN JOHNSON

ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY.

By Mildred D. Taylor. Narrated by Lynn Thigpin. Unabridged. Penguin Audiobooks. $32.95.

Have the people of our country made significant progress in solving the problems of friendships and fair business transactions between races?

"Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" is set in Mississippi during the early '30s, but the story could have happened in later times in any number of places. Mildred Taylor won the Newberry Medal for children's literature in 1977 for the novel. This newly-issued audio set of six tapes provides eight hours of listening and brings Taylor's words to life, giving the listener a realistic feeling of involvement.

This is an audio book for the thinking child of 8-12 years of age, and it would make a fine social studies unit.

- MARY SUTTON SKUTT

Mary Ann Johnson is book page editor.

Mary Sutton Skutt is a children's writer in Rockbridge County.

Habitat turns 20

Reviewed by MARGARET GRAYSON

IF I WERE A CARPENTER: Twenty Years of Habitat for Humanity. By Frye Gaillard. John F. Blair. $24.95.

As a charter board member of Habitat for Humanity in the Roanoke Valley, I came to "If I Were a Carpenter" with more interest than the average reader. Even so, I opened its pages with about as much enthusiasm as if I were beginning a math homework assignment. To my surprise, I was instantly drawn into the compelling story of Habitat's first 20 years and did not put the 174-page book down until the last page was read.

Frye Gaillard does a masterful job of keeping the narrative flowing as he moves from the organization's inception - it was the shared vision of a renegade Georgia Baptist preacher, Clarence Jordan, and of Millard Fuller, a disillusioned, self-made millionaire whose personal life was about to come unraveled - to 1996 when the Habitat main office in Americus, Ga, could report a success story of 50,000 houses in 1,200 communities at home and 48 countries abroad. Habitat for Humanity, a Christian organization, builds and sells houses to the poor at no interest and for no profit. "If I Were a Carpenter" is a record of changed lives and changed communities mostly, but not always, for the better. Gaillard traveled widely in preparation for writing this account. In Uganda he found greed and corruption in the Habitat ranks, and in Malibu, Calif., pride and arrogance among the volunteers, both of which he faithfully recounted. Nor did he back away from the retelling of a sexual harassment accusation against Fuller, Habitat's founder, visionary and "gadfly."

The book is an honest, fair, beautifully written account - a celebration, really - of 20 years of a successful venture to provide affordable housing and a feeling of hope and pride to low-income families all over the world.

Margaret Grayson teaches Latin at North Cross School.

LENGTH: Long  :  223 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  (headshots) Smith, Frost, Shepard.