St. Francis Poems (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | David Craig | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

After Mary, St. Francis is clearly the most popular and influential of all the disciples of Jesus Christ. He embodies the spiritual poverty, humility, and childlikeness which are absolutely essential for anyone who wants to grow. And it is fitting, too, to examine his life in poetry, since Francis is considered by many to be the father of Italian poetry. In these St. Francis Poems, David Craig gives us what literature should: slices of Henry James’s “lived life” as they move past sentimentality to get to the hard-edged, visceral realities in the original texts—though they never lose sight of laughter or of simple joy. These poems invite us to celebrate with Lady Poverty around her meager table, which is fitting, since that is the only place we will ever be fed.

This project itself revisits the haunts of David Craig’s first book, The Sandaled Foot (1980). But here St. Francis seems to come even more deeply alive––next to shelves of cool, protected water, in the red meadows of praise.

“If anyone has drunk deeply of the model of St. Francis for our time, it has to be David Craig. He scatters flowers of spiritual wisdom with abandon toward us, which again and again and again bless even as they burn.”
—Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

“David Craig is a rare breed of religious poet, a contemporary metaphysical who like Donne or Hopkins welds fact to faith, and like no one else shows us the glimmers in the particulars of surfaces . . . This poetry is transformative; it floods the reader with the richness of the real . . . I think David Craig really is the best religious poet writing today.”
—Janet McCann, author of Wallace Stevens Revisited: “The Celestial Possible”

On the Gospel Sonnets:

“Taken singly, each poem is wonderfully crafted and deeply wise. Taken together, they stand as an achievement that is nothing less than monumental. They confirm what I have long suspected, that David Craig is among the finest religious poets writing today.”
—William Bedford Clark, author of The Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren

David Craig is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Mary’s House, and two works of fiction. He has also coedited three collections of Christian poetry with Janet McCann. He is a professor of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has been blessed to teach creative writing students for twenty-five years.