A poet for now …

… Patrick Kavanagh is the Catholic poet we should be reading this Advent | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Wonder is our human instinct for the mysterious, and for Kavanagh, it is the catalyst for the sort of religio-poetic vocation he envisages for himself and for his readers. The genius of Kavanagh as a Catholic poet was the lightness of touch with which he intuited wonder as a characteristically religious state of mind, and identified God as the mystery at the heart of our human lives. Kavanagh’s was by no means a straightforward religiosity, and his poetry is not straightforwardly devotional. In fact, his passionate Catholicism is often overlooked in assessments of his work. But this is the man for whom poetry was “a mystical and a dangerous thing” and who declared stoutly: “the poet is a theologian.” As we begin another liturgical year in search of our own spiritual rebirth, Kavanagh offers wonder as the gateway to such rebirth.

Patrick Kavanaugh’s Advent.