Bücher veröffentlicht von Saint Julian Press, Inc.

PRAISE for THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT BEING AN EPISCOPALIAN Ron Starbuck is poet who has taken to heart and soul the teaching in Psalm 46, 'Be still and know that I am God.' Spoken in the voice of a deep listener, who seeks to embrace all souls in the Mystery of God's Love, who seeks to heal the breach. These poems are ecumenical both in that they are unifying and in the etymological root of the word, which is derived from the Greek word for house. Here is poetry that beautifully and prayerfully makes of the world a home where all of us may dwell.~ Aliki Barnstone, University of MissouriRon Starbuck has written a work of extraordinary vision and prophecy; this is a book of both profound reverence and a song of contemporary liturgy. It is a masterpiece that will transform the belief and devotion of all who experience these lines, either verbally or literally. Without doubt, this is a great work for the new Twenty-First Century.~ Kevin McGrath, Harvard University

Thomas Simmons' collected poems are a burning-a wild search of blue flame, the kind with the least oxygen but the most heat, a kind that levels a landscape built on a range of religion, myth, philosophy, erotic intimacy-and aims to rebuild it with the act of looking at it with clear eyes.From the shut-in child who says, "I began to calculate the area … of my life" and "how much I had, in inches, millimeters, feet," to the reveling in the grown body's hidden ecstasies and "the rightness of the body in its rightful place," Simmons' poetry contains a watchfulness that is complicated by its own act of watching. It is a watchfulness aware of its failings, which vacillates from an undistracted mission-such as Muhammed who, with the "tunnel vision" of religious fervor, only sees "out of the corner of his eye, the child Ayesha uncupping her hands and lifting the butterflies aloft"-to the full acknowledgement that any understanding comes beyond language, like the father and the child who take a wordless walk in the snow and discover "it had been enough, the sound / Of boots in the snow, the quiet, the sudden sun, Her hand in his."Simmons examines how human experience is best understood with tools outside of language, outside the relentless pursuit of assigning sign to signifier. There he says, we can find among the wreckage, "the beauty of it: my own circular ruins." For it is the not "hard words that we train for" but its subsequent weighty silences, the aftermath, and after reading it, one is left haunted and unsettled by images-such as the child shaking in his loft bed during a hurricane busily loosening the rafters of his house-images that silence our chatter-filled mind as we recognize it, unfailingly, as ourselves. --Leslie Contreras Schwartz, author of Fuego and Nightbloom & Cenote