Invisible Light: Poems About God - Tapa dura

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Diana Culberton is professor emerita of English and comparative literature at Kent State University. She is the author of The Poetics of Revelation and the editor of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop: Selected Writings.

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Luminous poems on an infinite subject -- God

"No one knows God or speaks of God apart from experience, and our experiences are all different -- and all limited. But the finitude of experience gives it intensity and urges us forward in awareness that the mystery beyond us is some-how penetrable and that even darkness has its revelatory power.... This collection of poems is a small contribution to the struggle for meaning and the search for what our theologies cannot enclose".

-- from the Introduction

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FOR THE FIRST TIME GOD is the subject of a poetry anthology in English. Among the classic poets represented in this collection are Donne, Herbert, Milton, Blake, Emerson, E. B. Browning, Tennyson, Dickinson, and Hopkins; among the twentieth-century poets, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Countee Cullen, Jessica Powers, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Anne Sexton, Alicia Ostriker, and Kathleen Norris. From the chorus of these many poetic voices come stunning words, images, and insights -- from Paul Murray's depiction of "that needle's eye / through which all the threads / of the universe are drawn" to Gwendolyn Brooks's touching rumination on God as someone lonely, who "tires of being great / In solitude. Without a hand to hold".

Invisible Light is focused on God in the three largest monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- and is divided into three sections: "From God" (in God's voice, in the first person), "To God" (generally prayers, addressed to God, in the second person), and "About God" (in the third person).

Witty, passionate, melancholic, sanguine, and ecstatic, the poems approach their single subject from the most diverse attitudes and perspectives. "The doubters, believers, lovers and philosophers, the anguished and flippant, submissive and prayerful, speak for us and about us", Diana Culbertson writes. "Through their words, we may possibly see God anew".