The Gods

Current recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, Albert Goldbarth now offers The Gods, his survey (part spiritual, part sly and snazzy) of ideas of deity in our half-crazed late twentieth century.
In this new collection, Goldbarth casts his omnivorous intelligence into a landscape where plaster lawn ornaments of the Virgin Mary and of scoop-necked flamenco danseuses are frozen side-by-side in their gamboling. The poems are various in tone and direction, ranging from one-page lyrics to, for example, a semi-narrative mock heroic epic on the adventures of the deity Speedy Alka-Seltzer. They loop from the devout to the ribald and back again, they chronicle Goldbarth's immigrant grandparents (mixing it up with Bruegel, Houdini, and others), and they extend through the everyday details of our joys and griefs to the far hearts of stars and the measureless ticking of subatomic particles.
But what connects these poems into a unified whole is the book's exploration of modes of faith. For this venture Goldbarth seems to be especially qualified. Reviewing him in the New Yorker, Helen Vendler said, "Half of Goldbarth's imagination ... is what is usually called religious. Goldbarth's tenderness toward the mystical does not however, vitiate his enormous curiosity, or the momentum of his zest, or his sympathy of souls with the historical personages he resuscitates.... His rhetoric is eager to mirror the number of things the world is full of, the unexpected fulfillments it holds in its arms."
This is a book both wild and wise, by a writer the National Book Critics Circle has cited for being "manna in the desert, a cure for what ails our poetry."