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A Word in My Mouth
These poems--selected from the past three decades--are firmly rooted in what Richard Wilbur called the "hunks and colors of the world." They faithfully try to take into account a world we did not make and, at the same time, record the terrifying and painful contradictions of human experience. And finally, they try to do so while remaining open to the intrinsic joy of being. These are poems rooted in the belief that words can invoke those presences which bring us back, again and again, to the fundamental experience of being: that there is something rather than nothing. The poems in A Word In My Mouth embody, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire."
Without My Asking
In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition--"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits--of what we can know and not know--and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives--from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder--these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."
In My Life
"These 56 essays, excerpts, short stories and poems, collected and reprinted by the three poet-editors from diverse sources, reflect how their authors -- music critic Greil Marcus, poets David Wojan and Donald Hall, early Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe and many others -- have loved and internalized the Beatles and their music ... In his poem 'Portland Coliseum, ' Allen Ginsberg, for example, exultantly recounts attending an early Beatles concert. Indeed, the Beatles' very public February 9, 1964, appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show comes up again and again in these pages as a sort of mantra for a generation's coming of age (though Leonard Bernstein writes of how the four moptops overwhelmed a 46-yea...
Common Life
Common Life looks at the various meanings of common, especially its senses of familiar and widely known; belong or relating to the community at large; and its twinned notions of simple and rudimentary and vulgar and profane. The book's perspective is religious, and is grounded in the epigraph from the Psalms: "Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him." The "waiting" that is required has to do with three things: first, our desire, as Charles Wright puts it, "to believe in belief" rather than believe; secondly, the need for a setting aside of the self, an abandonment of "every attempt to make something of oneself, even...a righteous person" in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and thirdly, the "waiting" must be as Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets a waiting "without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing." If we learn to wait in these ways, the final section of the book suggests that we have the chance of opening ourselves to all that is graceful within life's common bounds.
Heavy Grace
Poetry. HEAVY GRACE is the third collection of poems by Robert Cording, exploring what he terms the "deep syntax of grief" with spirituality and humbleness. "Cording recognizes that the 'heart cannot be comforted, ' yet his stern poems offer a measure of solace, a kind of grace - a way to live in ther here, the now." - Christopher Merrill
Finding the World's Fullness
Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace. This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire." Cording's task has therefore been to evoke what he calls "the primordial intuitions of Christianity": that we live in a world we did not create; that God's immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot "taste and see" that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it. The reflections in Finding the World's Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, "The world's fullness is not made but found."
Against Consolation
The title poem takes its name from a passage by Simone Weil, "We must not weep so that we may not be comforted." But in this and other poems, Robert Cording offers a more hopeful vision of our ability to find consolation in the world we inhabit--a world endowed will offer endless spiritual possibilities, both in nature and within ourselves.
Body of Diminishing Motion
This collection of poems and memoir is the second title from Laurel Books, CavanKerry's Literature of Illness imprint which features poetry and prose that explores the many poignant issues associated with confronting serious physical and/or psychological illness. Sidney speaks to the author's experiences living with multiple sclerosis for four decades, as well as her personal legacy as the daughter of a strong-willed Holocaust survivor. Body of Diminishing Motion will speak to anyone who has been touched by illness and refused to succumb to its power.
The Lion and the Land of Narnia
Presents a collection of reflections on "The Chronicles of Narnia" by fans and experts, letters about Narnia by C.S. Lewis, and paintings depicting scenes from the books.
Afghan Modern
Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age. Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, th...
