Dear Editor,

Nate Klug writes in your February issue [“The Upside of Terror?”] that the “terror of a life lived in the Christian faith has produced some of our greatest poetry,” but that contemporary religious poetry, rather than “confronting you with a soul drowning in God...is much more likely to invite you in for a dip.” Klug reviews Scott Cairns’s poetry as an example. To try Klug’s thesis that Cairns’s Compass of Affection fails to grapple with the anguish of the spiritual life, I employed a little test—the old technique—Sortes Biblicae (previously, Sortes Homerica, Sortes Virgilianae) and let his book fall open randomly to see what the fates had to say. Before me lay “Blesséd Being,” a poem about having failed, even by middle age, to have embraced the poverty “promising to adorn the heart,” having chosen so often instead the solace of “scotch/served neat.” “I’d hoped by now to have commenced, at least, to pray.” I don’t know what more poignant confession of doubt, failure, and darkness, all so ubiquitous on the spiritual path, Klug was hoping to find.

logan, utah