A Companion for Your Journey from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost"Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free."—St. John ChrysostomLent is a pilgrimage of the soul when Christians have always commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus with a season of reflection. Through poems, essays, and devotional readings, A Radiant Resurrection invites you into the time of reflection from Ash Wednesday through Eastertide. Writt...

A Companion for Your Journey from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost"Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free."—St. John ChrysostomLent is a pilgrimage of the soul when Christians have always commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus with a season of reflection. Through poems, essays, and devotional readings, A Radiant Resurrection invites you into the time of reflection from Ash Wednesday through Eastertide. Writt...

Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop—“The bight is littered with old correspondences”—Scott Cairns avers: “So, also, is my mind.”Indeed, it was Bishop’s “The Bight”—encountered late in his undergraduate education—that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact of literary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been to some degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds—the landscape, the heavens, or—as in ...

From Saint Paul to Julian of Norwich, Scott Cairns has lovingly examined, pressed for the revelation, and set in verse the most memorable, beautiful sayings of the fathers and mothers of Christianity. The startling result is a fresh encounter of ancient wisdom and provocation.These poems are unified in a common claim that Love is the most compelling name of God and the most apt attribute of the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being. In that spirit Cairns offers "a mer...

The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible is a volume of poems divided into three parts. The three parts are bound together by a brace of persistent and developing themes, as well as by the repetition (and the development) of language, metaphor, and imagery. Part 1 presents various characters (mostly African American) confronting death. The poems in part 2 are spoken by an unnamed narrator about his cancer. My cancer, actually, and my experiences. Parts 2 and 3 both descend into silence. Part ...

What role should ambition play in our lives? Our culture generally buys the American Dream that yes, we can fulfill all our aspirations. But to seek personal power and fame in the competitive world of Western culture has a dark side. Ambition can be subtle and enticing, leading to great unhappiness. Questions about ambition are more urgent now than they have ever been. What is ambition, exactly, and is it okay to be ambitious? What part does self-esteem play in personal growth and producti...

A new collection from one of our favorite poets. Fourteen “Idiot Psalms,” surrounded by dozens of other poems, make this his most challenging collection yet. “Idiot Psalm 1” O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind—while apparently aloof—allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollo...

This is a book to savor slowly and return to often." — Malcolm Guite, author of Sounding the Seasons and other collectionsNew poetry from Scott Cairns on containing the uncontainableOften, when speaking of what he has called the poetic operation of language, Scott Cairns has characterized that event as our "glimpsing an indeterminate, inexhaustible enormity within a discrete space." This is the poet's continuing fa...

Thirst, a collection of forty-three new poems from Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver, introduces two new directions in the poet's work. Grappling with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over forty years, she strives to experience sorrow as a path to spiritual progress, grief as part of loving and not its end. And within these pages she chronicles for the frst time her discovery of faith, without abandoning the love of the physical world that has been a hallmark of her wo...

A Season in Hell is an extended poem written and published by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, for example the Surrealists. Henry Miller was important in introducing Rimbaud to America in the sixties. He once attempted an English translation of the book and wrote an extended essay on Rimbaud and A Season in Hell titled The Time of the Assassins. The poem is loosely divided into nine parts, some of which are much shorter than ot...

This is about my walk with Christ in good times and bad times. The closer you grow to Christ the more you trust him.

For the first time in paperback-Levertov's recent poetry, showing her at the height of her literary powers. Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.