If artists are no longer able to fall back on the explanatory power of familiar grand narratives, or to lift up, within a story's scope, any single perspective as the key to reality, how can literature make good sense of life? What possibilities still await realistic fiction, given that earlier conventions of realism are widely received, today, as contrived, overdone, and insupportable? While walking the skeptic's tightrope, fiction writers must still find ways to recover the enduring virtues of fiction-to create sympathy between character and reader so as to truthfully render common human experience against the fragmentations of a postmodern world. Faced with the inherent limitations of fictional technique-and an audience trained to be hyper-conscious and even cynical in the face of those limitations-novelist Christopher Beha nevertheless finds ways to re-enliven the aesthetic quest to represent real life in an amorphous age. The consequential weight of free will and the restless longing for transcendence do not dissolve into lost illusions; instead, they turn out to be as demonstrably present to Beha's characters as the smooth pane of a window or the polished handle of a car door. As Beha's novels achieve an outward turn, freeing characters from solipsistic self-focus, they also move toward locales and liturgies widely supposed to be empty of any metaphysical reality-only to find these empty places uncannily occupied.
"We must listen carefully to Bernanos to learn how love and indignation, obedience and a critical spirit, can interpenetrate fruitfully in a . . . heart."-Hans Urs von Balthasar"The stakes in Bernanos feel just as vital as in any war fiction. This is because, for Bernanos, the characters' souls are on the line."-Phil Klay, recipient of the National Book AwardGeorges Bernanos' first novel Under Satan's Sun grips the problem of evil like a firebrand and does not let go no matter the burn. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his Church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that come into play in the priest's fateful encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was one of the twentieth century's most forceful and idiosyncratic writers and perhaps the most original Roman Catholic writer of his time. He wrote most of his major fiction in a period of barely twelve years, between 1926 and 1937, including his best-known work, The Diary of a Country Priest. ABOUT THE TRANSLATORJ. C. Whitehouse (R.I.P.) was Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Bradford. He is the author of Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos and the translator of many books, including Bernanos's The Impostor.
In these stories, characters' bodies trouble their souls, stirring questions about why we are here and how we are to live. Confronted by their own vulnerabilities, they must also contend with the weaknesses of those they want to love. Will they find their trust well placed; will they rise to moments of grace-or will their lives crack under pressure? These stories seek to do justice in art to the human condition's real, though fleeting, gifts-to our much-explored, but only ever partially understood, potential for comic resolution, tragic failure, and the substance of things hoped for between the two.
In Utopia of Usurers G.K. Chesterton takes to task the theoretical and practical fallout of laissez-faire capitalism. The book invites all comers to reconsider their ideological prejudices concerning "conservative" love of the free market. As Chesterton argues in "The Superstition of Divorce":"Capitalism, of course, is at war with the family. It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as 'individual.' If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline . . . these individualists will redistribute it in the form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms."Either our times are ripe for Utopia of Usurers, or Utopia of Usurers is ripe for our times.
Known as the "Phoenix of the Americas" and "The Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a scholar, poet, and cloistered nun. Her poetry, like her singular life, is fired with intensity and intelligence. Neither life in a convent nor the strictures of time and place could bind Sor Juana's thirst for knowledge or her creativity. As Sally Read notes in her introduction, when reading about Sor Juana and her work "one has the sense of a woman who pours out poetry as a tight faucet shoots out high-pressure water. The time in which Juana was born, and the culture of New Spain, were the constricting faucet; her writing was the irrepressible flood."Translating Juana's work into English carries a grave risk, for it would be far too easy to drown in the flow of imagery, music, and wit. With her innate sensitivity and deft craft, Rhina P. Espaillat is one of the few poets capable of navigating us through the "irrepressible flood" and safely onto the luxurious shores of Sor Juana's work. This book represents the confluence of two poets, each extraordinary in her own right, who have joined together over time to create a work that overflows with the enchantments essential to verse-music, metaphor, and meaning.Review:"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's verse exhibited a mastery of form, together with an abundance of serious wit, that made it impossible to deny the poet her rightful place in a culture dead set on denying it. Her gifts and skills continue to open minds and, to borrow one of her own images, to render them opulent by learning. Now the great Rhina P. Espaillat, a poet every bit as gifted and skilled as Sor Juana, has rendered the nun's deathless poems in all their perfectly measured opulence. An encounter with these sparkling translations will leave readers doubly enriched."-BORIS DRALYUK, award-winning translator, critic, and author of My Hollywood and Other Poems
"Francini Bruni, friend to Joyce in Trieste, wrote that 'he only completely admires the unchangeable: the mystery of Christ and the mute drama that surrounds it.' Colum Power, in a study of remarkable patience and rigour, traces Joyce's deep engagement with the more articulate forms which that necessarily mute, often mystical drama has sometimes taken when reduced to the humiliations of language . . . "-From the Introduction by Declan Kiberd, author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's MasterpieceReviews of James Joyce's Catholic Categories:"I am delighted to learn of this work about Joyce, being one of a relatively small number of Joyce critics who see him as having a very substantial religious sensibility; a topic that I continue to find of great interest and importance."-Weldon Thornton, author of The Antimodernism of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"A very important book. I now understand Joyce better. Critiquing Joyce and Joycean critics is always perilous, affording many opportunities to tumble ignominiously from the tightrope of true balanced perspective. This book crosses that abyss with awe-inspiring aplomb! Leaves one almost breathless, the masterful handling of the material."-Joseph Pearce, author of The Quest for Shakespeare"A wonderful book, I have read it with great pleasure. The author has surely done his homework. The arguments are compelling and expressed with grace and style; an excellent contribution to Joyce studies."-Mary Lowe-Evans, author of Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company"A book of enormous significance not only for students of Joyce but for our coming to grips as a nation with Irish Catholicism, but it has enormous potential way beyond the special local Irish interest, considering the widespread influence of Joyce on world literature."-Father Vincent Twomey"A work of impressive quality, not only a matter of knowledge and extensive readings of Joyce's critics. The substance and course of the reflection is really interesting . . . So many of the observations made are absolutely remarkable."-Father Antoine Levy, O.P.A Note About the Author:Fr. Colum Power, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1965, is a religious missionary priest. He obtained a Master's degree in Anglo-Irish Studies (1st hons.) at University College Dublin in 1991, a Licentiate in the History of Theology (9) at the San Vicente de Ferrer Faculty of Theology in Valencia, Spain, in 2011, and a doctorate in the History of the Church (9.2) at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome in 2013.
Regarded by many as one of the finest Spanish poets, the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross wrote sublime poems that chronicle the soul's purificatory pilgrimage through the dark night of the soul to the joy of mystical union with the Creator. To translate such works, with their passionate, intimate intensity, requires both boldness and delicacy.The translator of poetry faces many challenges. As the late poet Timothy Murphy notes in his introduction, she must adhere "not just to beauty but to truth." In these masterful renderings, Rhina P. Espaillat proves her prowess as both poet and translator. Espaillat has lived with these poems since she was a child, having heard them recited by her father. Her deep and loving connection to the sound and substance of these works has brought forth verses-exquisite in their own right-that transmit both the truth and the beauty of St. John's original.
The title of Andrew Frisardi's The Moon on Elba comes from one of its poems, a beautiful ghazal, striking in its graceful blend of form and intelligent feeling. The book's opening poems include the Audenesque meditation "Word" and a character poem, "The Jeweler," in which marvels are found, ironically, in the mundane. Frisardi writes of bedtime when we "undress-rehearse for death." He offers a Covid poem in Sapphics and a lovely ballade for "That singing contradiction," the late Timothy Murphy.
One Mardi Gras night in 1520s Paris, college students Jean Calvin (founder of Calvinism and autocratic ruler of Geneva), Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Counter-Reformation Catholic religious order, the Jesuits), and their bawdy friend François Rabelais (the humanist novelist) find themselves mixed up in a gruesome murder-and any one of them might be guilty. The ensuing investigation sparks a battle of wits and weapons, plunging them into questions of justice and mercy, grace and sin, innocence, guilt, love, and contempt. Before the bells ring in the start of Lent, they must confront the darkest parts of their souls and find the courage to pursue truth in a world that seems intent on obscuring it. Sonnez Les Matines imagines what might have happened if these three brilliant, volatile men had to put their convictions to the test while navigating a brutal crime and their own involvement in it. When left to his own devices, each character speaks in his own verse form, giving the play the feeling of a fierce sparring match between masters. Calvin's blank verse toys with despair as he wrestles with doubts about the good-ness of God and the possibility of freedom; Ignatius commands situa-tions in clipped iambic tetrameter, revealing his background as a disci-plined soldier, while his passion for order shows through in frequent alliteration; and Rabelais dances around with iambic rhyming couplets, cracking profane, bawdy jokes that unexpectedly become profound meditations on the mysteries of God, creation, and grace.
The author of this small but superbly crafted book of lyrics, epigrams, and translations, J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985), is almost totally unknown outside a small literary coterie. His controversial contemporary Yvor Winters thought Cunningham was one of the greatest of the poets in our language, and, despite their complicated personal relationship, vigorously promoted his work. First issued in 1960, The Exclusions of a Rhyme brings together Cunningham's first four books of poetry-The Helmsman, The Judge is Fury, Doctor Drink, and Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted-published between 1942 and 1959, as well as a "prefatory" poem, "To My Wife," and a handful of translations of Latin poetry.Cunningham would always consider himself a Westerner and once opened a lecture at Amherst by referring to himself as a "renegade Irish Catholic from the plains of Montana," despite not having lived in Montana since his youth. The American West left its mark on his imagination, as can be seen in the imagery of many of his poems. As any reader will quickly observe, Cunningham's verse is formal in the extreme-there is nothing accidental, no wasted verbiage, nothing extra, no Whitmanian inclusiveness. Though his poems deal with a variety of subjects and themes both serious and unserious-"the trivial, vulgar, and exalted"-and employ many different poetic styles and meters, to a poem they exhibit a scrupulous attention to matters of form.At its best, Cunningham's "exclusions" have an emotional intensity that seems almost overwhelming at times. As in much classical poetry, the disciplined restraint of the form seems to intensify its power to convey and evoke emotion. There is something almost fierce and wild, as of a barely tamable animal, in his verse, which the form seems to be struggling to keep at bay; and the very strength needed to control the wild emotion somehow manifests its power.
These two essays by Raïssa Maritain-"Sense and Non-Sense in Poetry" and "Magic, Poetry, and Mysticism"-comprise an often forgotten but significant contribution to Catholic letters. Maritain considers the way true poetry always transcends its "logical sense" in order to convey a "poetic sense." Poetry is a human thing, but it stirs the human beyond mere "logic" in the direction of the divine. In his introduction, James Matthew Wilson explains that, "Poetry is the fruit of a contact of the spirit with reality, which is in itself ineffable, and with the source of reality, which we believe to be God himself in that movement of love which causes him to create images of his beauty." While the poet might be prayerful and the mystic might wax poetic, there is a "fundamental difference which separates the poetic experience from the mystical experience: while the poet progresses toward the Word, the mystic tends toward Silence." As Raïssa Maritain expounds, mystics may be moved to describe their heightened experiences, but for them this "expression is not a means of completing the experience." For the furnishing of her interior castle, a mystic like St. Teresa of Avila needs no speech; her talk, the record she left us of the "prayer of quiet," is "only a result of superabundance, a generous attempt at communication."The poet, on the contrary, cannot do without words. They are the vital stuff of his service to the world. Albert Béguin corroborates Maritain's conclusion, contending that "whatever value one attributes to the poetic act, it remains an act submitted to the necessity of form. It ends at the word." On the other hand, the poetic word points beyond language, ever striving for a fuller communion with reality and its Maker.Inhabiting the tensions between sense and nonsense, poetry and mysticism, articulation and its absence, Maritain manifests the hidden mysteries at the heart of all poetry worthy of the name.
In this swift yet comprehensive survey, Trevor Cribben Merrill considers the works of Martin Mosebach, Christopher Beha, Randy Boyagoda, and many others.
A new collection of poems by Samuel Hazo; the majority of which are published here for the first time.
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