David J. Rothman

Beyond All Bearing

Arts & Literature

“"There could be no greater honor to Western's Graduate Program in Creative Writing than that Susan Spear, our first graduate, has now also published the first full-length poetry collection by any of our alumni. It is a memorable debut. Over the past decade, Spear has refined an extraordinary ability to address both the quotidian and the sacred, transforming them into reflections of each other with a power of parable rare in any age. Such is her art that throughout Beyond All Bearing the ordinary becomes more and more transfused with the divine, and the divine even enters into daily living. Despite moments of great pathos and humor, however, this movement of God and Man towards each other is anything but easy or obvious. Like all strong poets, Spear deeply understands the gulf between reality and love, and insists on including both, from the body of her own son, 'a thin young man / belt around his neck,' to a God who 'is slow / and slowly tenders me the strength to go.' The book thereby comes to embody both a closely observed texture of reality along with great leaps of faith, conjuring the very strongest poets in this tradition. Only a true poet in this vein could render even grief 'beautiful beyond all bearing.'”

City Nave

Arts & Literature

“When I met Betsy K. Brown, I had no idea, as one cannot at first, that within her was a quarrel with herself that has led her to a sublime, fierce poetry of Catholic faith—but there is. Her unsettled, intense, and thoughtful quarrel with herself plays itself out in every dimension: rhetoric, description, metrics, themes, and more.”

On Earth . . .

Arts & Literature

“Spear’s book is rich with verbal grace. She presents a full, vibrant life with a measured elegance that can both contain and convey it. The collection gives us a vision of what it means to be attuned to the divine and the beautiful, without ever losing sight of what happens here ‘on earth.’”

Where Sunday Used to Be

Arts & Literature

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)