Bøger af Joseph Bottum

For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine's Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces--with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum. There's the comic: "Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word." There's the sentimental: "Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden." There's the reminiscent: "Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea." Along the way, there's the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical. "Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art," he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. "Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols," he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays, short stories, and carols gathered in one place--in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine's Press--is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.

"The poetry of Spending the Winter is musical and structured, whimsical and piercing, begging to be read aloud when one is not laughing or arrested by an image that hooks the heart. "Poems so severely beautiful that they become unforgettable after one reading," writes one poet. "A throwback to a time when lovers of poetry...looked for poetry of depth, wit, and craft from the likes of Auden and Larkin," adds another. With sections of comedy that show his wit, translations that echo his vast reading, and formalist poetry that reveal his craft, Bottum aims, in the way few poets these days do, at memorable lines and heart-stopping images as he seeks the deep stuff of human experience: God and birth and death-the beautiful and terrifying finitude of life. "We do with words what little words can do," he writes. But in Spending the Winter, Joseph Bottum shows that words can do far more than a little"--