Bøger af James Matthew Wilson

In James Matthew Wilson's fourth full-length collection of poems, the writer joins the great saint and theologian Thomas Aquinas to pause before "the thought of earthly sorrows" and to pray for "such a world that had so much to say." These poems stand in wonder before the tumult and beauty of created things and the capacity of the soul to rise above it. We move from encounters with the world as revelation, mystery, and promise, to great scenes of sin and fracture such as the bombing of Dresden, the execution of the Roman philosopher Cicero, and scandals in the Church. The volume begins with the prospects for an unborn child soon to enter our stormy world and concludes with a "Farewell" to the place, home, and setting of many of these poems. Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds is a story and pilgrimage through the troubles of our age and beyond them to the reason for our hope, "for all things turn about the love of God."

"This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All three writers wrote with a deep commitment to the intellectual life of Catholicism and saw the new movement in the arts as making possible for the first time a rich sacramental expression of the divine beauty in aesthetic form"--

This brilliant new book powerfully demonstrates how the evolution of Modern and Post-Modern criticism and theory, free verse, and political ideology have greatly diminished contemporary poetry. The final chapter is a tour de force that compellingly argues for meter as the catalyst that joins syllables, accents, and (often) rhyme to create the deeply subtle artistry of our language's poetry."What is poetry and what is poetry for? To ask the first question is to ask the second. To answer both in light of the western tradition stretching back to Homer, and against much modernist and postmodernist poetic theory and practice, is the goal of this remarkable book. Poetry's final end is nothing less than to arouse in us a profound sense of wonder in coming to know that 'Reality as a whole is formed as the good-world-order, the intelligible beauty showing forth from [the] cosmic circle of procession and return.'"-David Middleton, author of The Fiddler of Driskill Hill, in The American Conservative

In this Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen," "Four Verse Letters," and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost," and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface."¿¿¿¿"In James Matthew Wilson's newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today."-Helen Pinkerton Trimpi

Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead - an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents.