Marsha L. Dutton

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Arts & Literature

“These poems invite our presence by their personal reflection on the events of Scripture. Like the evangelists, Vivian writes narrative and confessional theology, urging us to join our presents with those of his speakers and to allow their recollections to give us new perspective. They are poems of memory as much as interpretation, embodying events lived by others from long ago with the help of their, and our, senses. Full of paradox and of erudition, they reveal the poet’s search to understand the obscure and to share both the struggle and the tentative understanding he has tentatively reached. Vivian does not feed his hearers with easily accessible piety but offers us blood and bread.”