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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Two Kinds of Simplicity

Two Kinds of Simplicity

Here two spiritual landscapes are set before us – that of the child and that of the contemplative monk. To begin with the child – the sad face of a little girl looks back from the cover of Minou Drouet’s book; and one cannot help wondering what warp of pain and isolation first triggered off these solitary poems, and what life lies ahead for their authoress. The poems have the strange calm and crystalline order of a child’s world before puberty. Every event has depth and significance; one could say, indeed, any event, because Minou Drouet can contemplate a holocaust of fire or the eyes of her Persian cat with the same fluid verve of association. Yet she is no mere exhibitionist. Her poems give the impression of being the effortless and sincere statements of a child intensely absorbed in her own emotions and sensations. Their tragic undertone comes from the knowledge of the reader that this child has not yet tried out her own powers of destruction, has not yet entered the common gaol of adult experience. So she observes, promises, and even threatens with a whole heart and mind –

page 345

Life, beware, for I’m on the watch just as summer’s on the watch for fruit, in which she’ll sink her golden teeth . . .

Who could read these lines without a protective care and grief?

In the poems of Thomas Merton one finds a different kind of simplicity – the rediscovery of innocence by the adult soul which divests itself of all attachment to created beauty in order to learn its own nothingness and be restored to its true identity

Where the fields end
And the stars begin
Listen, Elias,
To the winter rain.
For the seed sleeps
By the sleeping stone
But the seed has life
Whilst the stone has none . . .

This Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky has written over fourteen books of prose and verse. There is no slackening of his powers; rather an emergence from private writing to a lucid, controlled bone-bare statement of the central themes of human sin and divine redemption. His poems reveal a living man, never just a moralist. He is the best Catholic apologist I have ever read.

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