In this dynamic collection of poems, Drew Jackson explores the first eight chapters of Luke's Gospel. These are declarative poems, faithfully proclaiming the gospel story in all its liberative power. Here the gospel is the "fresh words / that speak of / things impossible." This powerful poetry helps us hear the hum of deliverance—against all hope—that's been in the gospel all along.
A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text. While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written. Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.
Shares uplifting advice about the virtues of forgiveness, offering strategic and biblically based advice on how to achieve peace and personal fulfillment by letting go of past wrongs.
For every day from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Day, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive reflections on it. A scholar of poetry and a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Lent.
Many Christians view the Bible as an instruction manual. While the Bible does provide instruction, it can also captivate, comfort, delight, shock, and inspire. In short, it elicits emotion--just like poetry. By learning to read and love poetry, says literature professor Matthew Mullins, readers can increase their understanding of the biblical text and learn to love God's Word more. Each chapter includes exercises and questions designed to help readers put the book's principles and practices into action.
On Biblical Poetry considers the characteristics of biblical Hebrew Poetry beyond its currently best-known feature, parallelism. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp demonstrates the many interesting and valuable interpretations that yield from a series of programmatic essays on major facets of biblical verse, careful attention to prosody, and close reading.
Where does poetry come from? For Janet Safford Cline, her poetry comes from a lifetime of loving words and putting them together to express her faith in Jesus Christ. A lifelong Christian, in her inspiring poetry collection, God Speaks to Me in Silence, she imagines biblical scenes and stories in the poems Shepherds, Temptations, and Why? She gently pokes fun at Sundays-only Christians in Dear Bishop. Janet lived many years in the Texas Panhandle and recalls it lovingly in her poem In the Panhandle, and she ponders her life in several poems about her family and friends. For the last forty years, she has lived on the Texas Gulf Coast, complete with hurricanes and uncertain weather, all of which is reflected in God Speaks to Me in Silence. God speaks to me in silence, never bombast or demand. The Lord of Lords is patient, always holding out his hand. I seldom take the time to sit and wait for his soft word, But I know Gods there and waits for me whatever has occurred. Its only when I quiet down I hear Gods wondrous voice. Gods always there to talk to me, but I have to make the choice. God speaks to me in silence, when my mind is rapt and still, And its up to me to listen then to hear his perfect will.
“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.
In this powerful new collection, one of our most dazzlingly inventive and prolific poets tackles a universal theme: the agonizing search for God that is part and parcel of the livse of all of us. As always, Anne Sexton's latest work derives from intense personal experience. She explores the dilemmas and triumphs, and the agony and the peace of her highly unorthodox faith, sharing all her findings with her readers as the quest progresses. Anne Sexton's poetry speaks to our most passionate yearnings for love and our deepest fears of evil and death. The uncompromising honesty and vividness of "The Awful Rowing Toward God" confirms her stature as one of the most compelling voices of our time. -- From publisher's description.
