303 - Block Island

Block Island
By Daniel Berrigan
Greensboro, N.C., Unicorn Press, 1985. 102 pp. $7.50.

The sea's eternal onslaught on the land is transformed in this spare yet spacious volume into a setting for the miraculous: "sea & land/are one blessing, like the paste/of spit and dirt, an unguent/in the Healer's hand."

This is a healing, sight restoring narrative, for-although set out as poems-the book becomes one fine-wrought exploration of the experience of sanctuary. Its overarching image is the house that, despite all battering of ocean waves, endures. This house is "Eschaton": Block Island home of William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, refuge for Berrigan while evading the "bird watching" FBI. As mainland "neighbors" during those turbulent times, my family and I were occasional guests-even house and dog sitters-at Eschaton, and I can vouch for the precision of eye and ear that informs these verses.

Berrigan captures the essence of Stringfellow. "Like the sea, he's no explainer, but pure depth./He's not on earth to unravel dreams-/to precipitate them rather." And of Towne, that shy enormous poet, "Resolved/like a Stonehenge circle, simply/to be." His stark description of Anthony's burial in a fierce Atlantic rainstorm conjures echoes of Hopkins' "Wreck of the Deutschland." The evocations of seagulls, "wild roses, blackberries, scoured pines" and of the islanders themselves are precise and breathtaking.

This book is crammed with Hopkins' "inscape," the vision piercing through the world to the Word, yet cherishing the world as it does so. Throughout, there runs the suspicion that this fragile house, this seawracked sandbar of an island, has become the sane and solid center of a tottering, insane world. Read it, over and over.

J. Barrie Shepherd
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
Swarthmore, Pa.