The Last Thing Is Longing
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
Written over a period of approximately twenty years, the poems in this collection are unified in a single theme--the experience of longing. The poems explore multiple expressions of longing--longing for love, for personal relationship, for youth, for beauty, for creativity, for the divine, for transcendence, for immortality--which are explored through the generous use of symbolic (sometimes theological) language, and often through images of nature. The ultimate "thesis" of the book is that while longing serves as the potency to carry one along the road of one's spiritual journey, it is also the last thing that must be let go of in order to reach one's destination--the last thing to be sacrificed before the heart is able to trust and to open to transcendent joy.
Endorsements (3)
“Dr. Rebidoux’s stunning use of imagery—especially the mother/child and garden metaphors—leads the reader along the poet’s symbolic path in her lifelong mission to seek the great universal spirit with which to become one. She has obviously not stopped her journey at ‘longing’ but has been an active seeker struggling through birth and growth pains in her search for light and truth.”
“Michelle Rebidoux is a scholar and a poet. She succeeds in holding together much that the rest of us must divide: mind and heart, joy and longing, divine presence and absence. We are gifted by these poems, which belong to the lineage of Rumi, John of the Cross, and Gibran. Above all, we are gifted by Rebidoux’s witness to the depth dimensions of human living and dying.”
“The Last Thing Is Longing is a new collection of devotional verse in an ecumenical mode that readers of divergent traditions will find congenial. Rebidoux names no God of any distinct tradition, yet the Lord she addresses throughout calls us from the very depth of the material creation he sustains and loves. The result is lush, musical verse in which passion is poised with grace and angelic lissomeness with chthonic energies.”
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