Habits Of Poetry Habits Of Resurrection

Something of a minor literary renaissance happened in midcentury America from an unexpected source. Nuns were writing poetry and being published and praised in secular venues. Their literary moment has faded into history, but it is worth revisiting. The literary creations of poetic priests like Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and Robert Southwell, S.J. have been both a blessing and a burden--creating the sense that male clergy alone have written substantial work. But Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th century Mexican poet-nun famous for her iconic verses and trailblazing sense of the role of religious creative women, set the literary precedent for pious work from women. Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, a critic and poet, was praised by Flannery O'Connor and kept long correspondences with many of the best poets of her generation. Carmelite nun Sister Jessica Powers published widely. Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, poet and university president, transformed Catholic higher education. The Habit of Poetry brings together these women and others. Their poetry is devotional and deft, complex and contemplative. This mid-20th century renaissance by nun poets is more than a literary footnote; it is a case study in how women negotiate tradition and individual creativity.

Recognized as one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, José Lezama Lima, born in Cuba in 1910, is associated with the Latin American neo-baroque and has influenced several generations of writers in and out of Cuba, including such prominent poets as Severo Sarduy and Néstor Perlongher. Lezama Lima's vision of America in a continental sense stands at the fertile confluence of indigenous, African, and European influences. A crucial experimental writer, he has been known in English chiefly for his novel Paradiso, while little of his poetry has been translated. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to Lezama Lima's poetry. It presents for the first time in English a generous selection of his poems, as well as an interview, essays, and critical work on his poetics. Ernesto Livon-Grosman has selected elegant and precise translations by James Irby, G.J. Racz, Nathaniel Tarn, and Roberto Tejada. His insightful introduction places the poet in the wider context of Cuban and Latin American cultural history.

The Habit of Spring is a collection of poems that celebrates our amazement and resilience as human beings as we become aware of our place in the universe and understand that after thirteen billion years of cataclysm and chaos, nature has evolved in us the capacity to be aware of itself, to know that it knows, to see that it sees. Self-awareness brings with it a relentless drive to delve deep into the heart of the matter to find the what, where, when, how, and why of our existence and then try to find the most exact and adequate way to express and communicate our discoveries. The poems in this collection try to tell how it feels when the sky falls in on us on a night full of stars, how we want at times to coalesce with other beings, how to return to the original singularity of creation, how we struggle to assert our will against the genetic algorithms that determine our relations, how we try to end the cold of our isolated existence by inventing divine beings who love us, or how we grieve when we realize our finality in the dying of garden flowers. Mostly, the poems keep taking us back to hope, urging us to align ourselves repeatedly with the thrust of the first moment, heed the sweet discomfort come back in the blood, the habit of spring, the possibility that returns again and again—and again!

It has been said that poetry is the art of naming things properly. Life, Death, And Resurrection is a book of poetry that is the fruition of the authors journey into monasticism, a journey which seemingly leads away from the world, but which is actually a rushing into reality; it is a journey to find the ultimate meaning of ones own existence, the ultimate meaning of life, and the name that God Himself gives to each one of us. This is a book about one souls search for God, and what that soul finds in this pursuit: life, death, and resurrectionGods own poem He hides within every aspect of our lives. In these poems we find that ultimately it is the journey that will define who we are in the end, and it is the Cross that will show us how to live this journey; we will find our truest self, our true name, only in our love for God and neighbor. As one poem reads: God comes to us in many ways In vision and mystery In the hand to be held The burden to be born The scars to be felt Which are our prisons to be shorn.

Old English Verse (1972) covers the whole range of Old English poetry: the heroic poems, notably Beowulf and Malden; the ‘elegies’, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer; the Bible stories and the lives of the saints which mark the end of pagan influence and the beginning of Christian inspiration; the Junius Manuscript; and finally King Alfred. All the many quotations are translated.