Sydney Lea

A Word in My Mouth

Arts & Literature

“I feel morally and temperamentally improved upon witnessing Cording's poetic witness--not because his instruction is in the least heavy-handed (quite the contrary), but because it is based in such profound and ultimately delighted observation and reflection. Of course, this wonderful author's work confronts the tragedies and reversals of human existence, but finally it echoes the scriptural injunction to recognize the day the Lord has made, to rejoice and be glad in it.”

Ascent/Descent

Arts & Literature

“Walter Wangerin’s Ascent/Descent is a book all but unique in my experience: its components are biographical, geographical, and—how to name it?—obliquely theological. But in all of the collection’s five sections, the principal word that leaps to my mind is lyrical. Rendering the elaborate narrative of his Virginia and Walter, realizing the hieratic voice of Rilke, even translating the Dies irae, so on, Wangerin’s mouth-fillingly rich language draws us so completely into his material that we are unable (and glad of it) to extricate ourselves. Pluperfectly absorbing!”

In the House of My Pilgrimage

“In the House of My Pilgrimage is so rich that to categorize it would inevitably be reductive, for it contains Donald Sheehan’s own poems, brilliant and utterly original readings of others’ poetry, autobiographical reflections, and preeminently, meditations on his own spiritual journey. The book is radically eclectic, yet also truly coherent by way of the enlightened and enlightening spirit that informs it. That spirit will be familiar to generations of colleagues and students, and welcomed by new acquaintances.”

Living in Language

Arts & Literature

“David Bosworth contends that ‘the history we are living is best understood as . . . a complex, interactive, ongoing novel.’ Note his response to a trendy commentator’s claim that language is about nothing but itself: ‘Our speaker didn’t seem to know that, beneath the precious mask his theory wove, the very sounds he spoke were pulsing with the passions of past events.’ We must rejoice that Bosworth, both erudite and humane, feels that pulsing more acutely than any other contemporary.”

Pruning Burning Bushes

Arts & Literature

“Wells has been granted--and she knows it--the grace to eat life right down to the seed, where the joy of the mystery lies, and the peace that passes understanding. Deft and inventive with strict form, with ambitious narrative, and with the poignant perspective that, when called for, comes of becoming a small child, Wells equally thrives on the merest simplisms of faith, on the densest meditation, and above all on her experience of full humanity, turning all to stunningly cogent advantage.”

Trespassing on the Mount of Olives

Arts & Literature

“Readers like me who have less command of Holy Writ than the author may be most taken with Davis’s skill and ardor in his (fitting) humanization . . . of the collection’s secondary characters. . . . Davis asks: ‘What does the man cradling / the water jar know of the Teacher?’ The answer in part is ‘Likely . . . nothing / more than where to stand and how / to hold the jar and to be watching / for two Galileans who will enter the city.’ The man’s a mortal like any of us, going about quotidian life, only to be stunned by the presence of a miraculous transcendence. We are stunned in turn by the deftness, magnanimity, and persuasiveness that Davis brings to this extraordinary sequence.”

What Cannot Be Fixed

Arts & Literature

“In his predictably pithy foreword to this volume, Martin Marty notes that 'Baumgaertner is not a confessional poet in the company of those who concentrate on themselves, whether their concentrations are revelatory or not.' And yet the poet's refreshing modesty is anything but mere timorousness. Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner is heroically persistent in her inquiries, her doubts, and her attestations.”