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The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse
Chosen and Introduced by Edward Short
With a Foreword by Dana Gioia
The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse brings together the work of poets from across the English-speaking world to celebrate the sacred art of poetry in all of its pied beauty.
Chosen by acclaimed Newman scholar Edward Short, the collection captures not only the range but the richness of Christian verse. The last comparable anthology of Christian poetry to appear was Donald Davie’s Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981): a proper successor, one more reflective of the true scope and variety of Christian poetry, has been long overdue.
The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse supplies that need with a dazzling compilation
encompassing over eight centuries of Christian verse by poets extending from Geoffrey
Chaucer, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton and Henry Vaughan
to Wiliam Cowper, Isaac Watts, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H.
Auden, T.S. Eliot and Dana Gioia. In between, readers will find poems about faith,
hope, love, loss, praise, rejoicing, mortality and immortality from such beloved
poets as St Robert Southwell, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Wallace Stevens, Charles
Causley, Elizabeth Jennings, James McAuley, and Richard Wilbur.
A perfect anthology
for schools, colleges and the general reader, The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian
Verse will serve as a welcome reaffirmation for readers around the world of how vital
Christian verse has been and remains to our deeply humanizing, deeply civilizing
Christian inheritance.
“This handsome book certainly contains a great deal of fine
poems -- some very familiar and much loved, others much less familiar but still deeply
affecting. Edward’s Short’s anthology will serve a teaching role very well…” Peter
Costello, The Irish Catholic
The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse “is a fantastic
achievement… Wonderful selections from Milton, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Wallace Stevens
Philip Larkin, - and a host of earlier writers, of whom I had never heard, on such
themes as the lamentations of the damned...and now the discovery of Elizabeth Jennings’
'Euthanasia'. What a poem. What an eye the editor has for the essential. What a
book. Sailing to Byzantium not with Yeats but with Admiral Newman into the fray.
Hurrah! God prosper this beautiful book.”—Father Dermot Fenlon
978 0 85244 986 8
412 pages
£20.00
**** To enquire about school and college bulk ordering please email: sales@gracewing.co.uk ***
