eBooks de Poesía, página 13 de 656

"Luci Shaw is a legend" Christianity TodayThis captivating collection of poems by beloved author Luci Shaw, reflects on daily ideas and activities as they arrive, bit by bit, to illuminate us with their wisdom and enlarge on the meanings of human experience. Like small messages from beyond, these incidents call us to pay attention. In An Incremental Life, Shaw breathes life into the simpleness of the every-day and finds God in the memory of the mundane. Through her verses, she explores the intricate tapestry of existence, from the tender memories of childhood to the profound questions of mortality. Her poems are like windows opening to the soul, inviting readers to pause, reflect, and savor the beauty of the world around them.INCREMENTSI live by increments, singlebreaths of an ambient air,marking off hours, days.Apprenticed to grace, I tread statio in sequentiae, edging every stepforward before venturing the next.Staggering up towards the stonycrests of the foothills, dusty, I amalmost undone with weariness, only halfbelieving that the view will widen.In my falling upward into your home,O Faithful One, stay with me,your wind music playing the ear ofmy mind like an instrument."This is how life happens, one day at a time, in increments! And God is in each of them for us," Luci Shaw

An imagined conversation with Dante Alighieri written in response to the 700th anniversary of Dantes death by fellow Catholic poet, lover and master of the sonnet, Angela Alaimo ODonnell.In the summer of 2021, Angela Alaimo ODonnell honored the 700th anniversary of Dantes death, by embarking on a three-month pilgrimage through the 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy, reading one canto per day. This new collection, Dear Dante, is her response to Dantes epic poem: 39 poems (13 for each of the 3 canticles), plus an additional 3 to serve as prologue and epilogue, all written in the poetic forms Dante loved best: the sonnet and the form he invented, terza rima.In ODonnells words: "Dear Dante is a species of accompaniment, an act of homage, and a long love letter to Dante. It might also be read as a series of meditations that attest to how dear Dante is to us. The Commedia is our inheritance, a gift granted to readers by our brother poet 700 years ago. These poems are an admittedly small expression of gratitude for that grand and graced gift. Grazie Mille, Maestro."

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 uncontainable Often, 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 poets continuing fascination with lacunae, those spaces, those openings that offer more within than appearances can register from outside the ostensible covert of their terms. Cairns is here focused upon how an image, a word, orin the case of the Theotokosa womb can contain the uncontainable. As Orthodox hymnography avers, she is more spacious than the heavens. So, too, the poet suggests, in its own, modest way, the poem might give birth to more, and more, and yet more than even the poet supposes.

A posthumous collection of poems on the beauty of the seasons, creation, life and death, from beloved poet Catherine de Vinck. In the words of the Foreword by Mary Evelyn Tucker, the poetry of Catherine de Vinck, "calls us to ever greater awareness of who we are and where we dwell. She offers us glimpses of truth, not answers to our questions. She lights the path, sometimes with the brilliance of a single image. More often she surrounds us with the atmosphere of duskthe twilight arising in our consciousness where mood and memory mingle."

Holy Sparks is a collection of poems grounded in a belief in the kinship between the cosmos and its Creator. Biophilic imagery is used throughout the poems to suggest that reverence for the earth is a natural consequence of reverence for God. The language of poetry is used to interconnect the human, natural and sacred, and to express humanitys moral and ethical responsibility to our nonhuman kin. These poems question what it means for humans to live in right relationship with earths lifesystems, and they suggest that our very identity is tied to our reverence for the natural world. They offer a space of confession, reparation and praise of what remains. Holy Sparks is a call to partake of Earths wisdom so that we might participate in the Creators ongoing work.

In his famed treatise Either/Or, Christian existentialist philosopher Sren Kierkegaard suggests that our basic human condition is one of choice and freedom. But what about when we struggle to discern the right path forward, when we stumble between contradictory desires, when we want everything? Such insatiability which the ancient Greeks called pleonexia leads to suffering and sorrow for ourselves and others, not to mention the earth we call home. But what about when "either/or" thinking becomes too rigid in its limits? What about those moments when we see scarcity instead of the many possibilities that abound, when fear keeps us from giving and receiving our full share?This book of poetry is an exploration of those times when it is necessary to make either/or choices as well as other times when, even if only briefly, we are able to echo Richard Rohr in affirming, "Yes, And." It is a story of stumbling in darkness and seeking light, of succumbing to sinfulness and facing consequences, of desiring deeply and bumping up against limits. Its about addiction and recovery, justice and mercy, redemption found through friendship and community. Its about seeking ways to open doors and tear down walls. Ultimately, it is about the divine grace that occasionally manages to expand our possibilities, transforming us into vessels of boundless compassion.

According to legend, the language of the birds was a mystical language God used to talk with Adam and Eve when he walked with them in the garden of Eden. Amy Nemecek listens for this divine dialect as she communes with God on her walks along country roads and creek banks, through forests and hayfields. She observes the world around her with expectation, knowing that God still speaks to us as he is at work making all things new. If we have ears to hear, we can catch snippets of his grace in the watercolor silhouette of a bird, the thrum of a tractor engine, the tang of a grapefruit, the curvature of an ampersand. Amy doesnt want to miss any of it, so she remains attentive to the smooth grit of beach sand, the tendrils of a nebula, and the steady gaze of a fossil. She delights in the details, and you will too.In this collection of lyric and narrative poems, you are invited to walk with her as she reflects on larger themes of beauty, loss, motherhood, family, and vocation. She contemplates the sacredness of ordinary moments that we usually dont recognize except in hindsight. Twining through every line is an aching hopefulness that ties together her love of words, her devotion to scripture, and her deep gratitude for each of lifes joys and griefs."Rub dust on your palms, pluck the ripened sunshine, and taste this poetic grace." Dwight Baker, president and CEO of Baker Publishing Group

"Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." Exodus 3:5"The Holy Land is everywhere." Black ElkThe two epigraphs that preface Angela Alaimo ODonnells Holy Land introduce the reader to the central theme that permeates her poems: that holy places deserve to be regarded with reverence and that all places are holy places. In her afterward, the poet traces these foundational concepts to her Catholic childhood wherein religious instruction consisted largely of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism. "One of questions the Catechism poses is Where is God? The answer is God is everywhere. We believed this to be true. God was in church, but God was also in our house (a crucifix in every room), in the backyard, in our Buick (rosary beads swinging from the rearview mirror), at our birthday parties in the basement, and in our own bodies. And though those places may not sound very holy, they were. Because God was there. Is there."In addition to affirming this foundational belief, these poems extend the terrain, moving beyond the geographical and the physical to the temporal, the carnal, the intellectual, and the spiritual realms. They assert that our days are blessed, our bodies are blessed, our minds and souls are all blessed and sacred ground. The poet explores a broad spectrum of physical locations, beginning with poems set in the Holy Land and moving on to places closer to home, ranging from the west of Ireland to rural Minnesota, from New York City to the Texas border. She also probes the temporal spaces we occupy, experiences of death and birth, love and loss, desire and desolation that mark our human passage.The English word holy is related to the Germanic word heilig, a word that means blessed and also carries within it the idea of wholeness. Holy Land attempts to honor both the holiness and the wholeness of our worldfrom Gotham to Golgotha, the Bronx River to the Sea of Galileeand to honor the holiness and wholeness of our blessed and broken humanity.

Winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize, Litany of Flights is a luminous examination of the journey of the soul, from moments of loss to moments of incandescent transformation. These poems remind us to behold the extraordinary in the ordinary, and that the secret workings of the divine occur even through the difficult: "the painful paring of your hollow bones has made you light." Drawing on the beauty of the natural world, the devastating effects of drought and wildfires, tender moments of daily experience, and lessons of the saints, the poet creates a landscape of light and darkness, with unexpected turns into divine presence and absence. Through a spiral of red-tailed hawks, the nest of a mourning dove, the parting of waters, and the ripeness of a persimmon, this shimmering collection invites the reader to singular and transfiguring flight. Litany of Flights (from the forthcoming collection)First, the winged movement, steady, forward. Scrub jays in flittingprogress, hawks in predator glide, a ringing up, a knife-sharp slopedown. Second, the effortless type, wind-splayed, motionless pinionsin thermal recline, as the Psalmist says, blessings breeze his love evenin sleep. Third, the hungry, against the gale, the destination singularand the sun dipping crimson. Fourth, the metallic, business or pleasure.Fifth, the whirring kind, all hummingbird. A picnic, apples and chocolatein the garden with roses, both flower and child. You miss it when its gone. Sixth, a baffling flight of stairs, winding upward, passage and yet vehicle,spiraling to unseen landingshope courses in the kaleidoscopic lights.Seventh, soar to the sun. Eighth, melt in bitter hubris. You know the story.Ninth, escape. A flight out of Egypt, a path through the sea cleared bydivine hand. The times you ran, the times you were left behind in lament.Tenth, only rotting in the belly of a whale tames your stubborn turn fromNineveh. Eleventh, flights of despair and of yearning, two sides of oneletting go, hard-earned release back into the wild, unbound by expectation,featherlike. Twelfth, in a moment, caught up high by the Beloved, the onemaking all things work together, wings, body, arch, aircaught up, like theShulamite bride, to regions beyond aeronautical wisdom, transported in joy.See, he says, the painful paring of your hollow bones has made you light.

In this collection, poet Sarah Law presents lucid, lyrical reflections on the much-loved saint, Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97), whose life and writing has been an inspiration to so many people. For Sar

Margaret B. Ingrahams collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to "taste and see" and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives. "What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the secret places of my brokenness. It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith." Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming.

Wing Over Wing clears a path in the midst of everyday life to reveal the holywhether catching fireflies at night, waiting at a bus stop, or experiencing the death of a loved one. This collection of beautiful poems lives at the intersection of the sacred and the ordinary, from the swirling flight of birds to conversations with the homeless. Wing Over Wing brims with compassion. The reader will find comfort and sustenance, as well as surprise and laughter, in these pages.

This collection offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poets creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs grief and the desire to honor those "saints" who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console as they do. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, "this far," and gestures to what lies beyond.

Sonnets are familiar to us, but not relevant. What do they have to do with our fast-paced, tech-driven, ever-shrinking contemporary world? But what if the sonnetinvented 700 years agocould come back like a cat with nine lives? A sonnet in the twenty-first century might serve as a sacramental form, calling us from our work-mad lives to quietness and reflection. In Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, Jeanne Murray Walker invites the reader to join her on a journey told in 58 colloquial sonnets, beginning in the slangy streets of New York and ending in the holiness of silence and praise. Stops on the journey include reflections on death and grief, but also praise for a migrating butterfly, a knock on the door, the astonishing ocean. This book is designed to be used as a devotional and read slowly; to be both a book of poetry and a spiritual companion.

What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poets view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the "end times," but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. This is not prophecy as foretelling, but forth-telling: telling us the truths of our lives in the light of Gods light. But rather than escape into some safe, heavenly realm, the poems return to our homes and meet us in the form of our neighbors, persecuted believers, and in shopping malls with vivid, edged-up language and the authority to believe and doubt at once.

Rooted in the grit of urban Baltimore and the forests of rural Massachusetts, these poems remind us that lifes tensions and polarities are energies we carry within ourselves.These are poems of witness and commentary, conversation and meditation. They offer moments of close looking, and of looking away; of loving, and of bungled attempts to be more loving. They call us to look long and hard and generously at our lives. Written with radiant honesty and fierce tenderness, they suggest a path of inner discovery where mystery awaits us in the ordinary.

Excerpted in Image Magazine No. 90 This collection of poems explores the saints of the churchs history and contemporary persons who embody something of their charism. Three sections are arranged around the themes of the three "theological virtues": faith, portrayed as a source of strength in times of trial; hope, the darkest in the book, dealing with matters of the bodys frailty, illness, social discrimination, and the search for a way to live within the constraints of society; and love, offering a panoply of outward-looking characters who give to others in radical or personal ways. The volume ends with a cycle of Franciscan poems that offer a model for the Christian life, not simply in terms of individual moments but also as a complete life-cycle of practice and prayer."Communion of Saints represents an unlikely achievement: deeply spiritual and delicate poems that speak directly to our modern moment."Yehoshua November, author of Gods Optimism

"If rhyme and meter are, as Heaney said, the table manners of the language arts, then Angela Alaimo ODonnell has set out a sumptuous feast, if not bardic, then beatific, recalling a time when pilgrims knew to spread good word by heart." Thomas Lynch, author of Walking Papers and The Sin-eater: A Breviary Still Pilgrim is a collection of poems that chronicles the universal journey of life as seen through the eyes of a keenly-observant friend and fellow traveler. The reader accompanies the Still Pilgrim as she navigates the experiences that constitute her private history yet also serve to remind us of our own moments of enlightenment, epiphany, and encounter with mystery. Each of the 58 poems of the collection marks a way station along the pilgrimage, a kind of holy well where the Pilgrim and reader might stop and draw knowledge, solace, joy, and the strength to continue along the path.At the center of this spiritual travel book lies a paradox: the Pilgrims desire for the gift of stillness amid the flux and flow of time, change, and circumstance. "Be still and know that I am God," sings the Psalmist, channeling the voice of the divine. "Teach us to care and not care. Teach us to sit still," prays the poet, T.S. Eliot. Still Pilgrim depicts and embodies this human dilemmaour inevitable movement through time, moment by moment, day by day, and the power of art to stop both time and our forward march, to capture the present moment so we might savor the flavor of life.

Featured in "The Millions" A year in Reading, Nick Ripatrazone."Each year I read more books than I can possibly review here are 5 of the finest and most memorable of that bunch. They are worth your money, your time, and your attention. A book of poems that fictionalizes the life of Trappist monk Charles de Foucauld. Beautiful verse, full of pieces like "The Pangs of Wanting:""I deliver my body to the church, / though I cannot imagine what penance might relieve / these pangs of wanting." Later: "I take first communionMy tongue licks up the bread: a whisper / of paper on my teethHis torn body in my stomach, / his blood in my spit, I almost vomit; I almost sing." More collections about God like this one would be very welcomed."Nick Ripatrazone, The MillionsCharles of the Desert is a novel-in-verse accompanying Charles de Foucauld, hermit and writer of "The Prayer of Abandonment," as he explores and adapts desert spirituality, monasticism, and contemplative prayer. Charles is an unusual and compelling figure and Charles of the Desert is unusual and compelling as well -- different from nonfiction books which focus on instructing in or explaining these subjects. It also explores Charles profound respect for Muslims, his pioneering efforts at interfaith dialogue, and his commitment to live among Muslims as a "universal brother" known for his compassion and solidarity.Born in 1858 to a family of French aristocrats, Charles was torn between his ambition to do great things and his desire for the hidden life, between public service and private prayer. Charles of the Desert uses elements of fiction and poetry to follow him to Morocco, Syria, Israel, and Algeria, as he becomes a cavalry officer, explorer, geographer, pilgrim, Trappist monk, priest, abolitionist, translator, folklorist, hermit, fort-builder, and martyr. Throughout these travels and transformations, Charles searched for a vocation that would reflect his convictions and his experience of God. In his last fifteen years, he settled in a remote part of the Sahara, and focused on self-denial, contemplation, and charity. He claimed the nomadic Tuareg as his brothers, the desert as his earthly home.

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 mere taste of the bountiful feast that awaits any who would pursue a life of faith and prayer equipped with both the holy Scriptures and the holy tradition that surrounds them."