Some Necessary Angels

This fine collection of essays, which shifts between personal, scholarly, and universal topics, opens with a tribute to author Jay Parini's mentors, then meanders through talk of small towns, baseball, and writing in restaurants. The centerpiece of Some Necessary Angels, though, is seven essays about the poetry of William Blake, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seamus Heaney, Alastair Reid, Robert Penn Warren, and Charles Wright. Parini comes out the other side of these eloquent examinations to ponder the place of the writer in the world. He calls upon Yeats's poetry and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath as proof that "poetry and fiction make things happen" (the former corresponded to the formation of the Irish Free State; the latter raised consciousness about the plight of migrant workers). He uses examples from his own work to address the issue of blurring lines between biography and fiction. Parini also uses the book to make a strong case against the isolationism of contemporary literary theory: "Jargon," he writes, "has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called common reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences." It used to be, says Parini, that "the shortlist of major poets from Ben Jonson to T. S. Eliot [was] more or less coincident with the shortlist of major critics." No more. Now, he says, "literature faculties in t