Six Sundays toward a Seventh
Spiritual Poems by Sydney Lea
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2012
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Publisher's Description
These poems--selected from the award-winning poet's output over four decades--more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.
Endorsements (4)
“The life in Sydney Lea's poems is entirely local, whether the locale is Italy, Montana, or his home in Vermont . . . The making of the soul that occurs in Sydney Lea's poems is intimately connected with the place where the making occurs . . . Sydney Lea's poems show us that all spirituality is local spirituality. He is our preeminent poet of the soul's making among local places and people.”
“Sydney Lea's heartbreaking and heartening poems look, with the utmost honesty, at 'what we may or may not be / here on earth.' . . . [These] urgent poems give us back the depth of our existence. With intelligence, passion, and humility, Lea embraces the task he has been given: to record those 'warming recollections' of parents, friends, wife and children, and to acknowledge how this 'splendid universe subsumes . . . his small dumb witness' into a 'hymn of grateful praise.'”
“In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea's affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.”
“From his experience of doubt to his affirmation of the Mystery, the poet's faith shows through honest and eloquent language . . . Lea's unique gift of language opens up the most ordinary detail of village life in northern Vermont and raises it to universal significance. His compassionate gaze at suffering and loss is balanced by his embrace of nature in all its forms and by moments of ecstatic revelation.”
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