In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.

The ultimate subject of Maya Catherine’s stunning debut collection is violence. American Faith begins with its manifestation in our country: a destructive administration, a history of cruelty and extermination, and a love of firearms. “He owns a gun farm in Florida/they grow in swamps like chestnuts.” The poet introduces a suite of poems that precisely imagines the consequences, a series of “cancellations”—of government, bees, the color wheel, the return to nature, and the end of the world. The violence naturally extends to the personal. The speaker’s Romanian grandfather keeps wild dogs in case a man tries to steal his daughters. A godmother is psychologically erased by her tempestuous husband, who is nevertheless generous to flowers. “It’s what happened inside her/that slouched.” And what for some is routine can feel like an assault: a TSA agent wipes down a bra tucked in a traveler’s suitcase, adding, “prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.” Tentatively, the title poem casts light on the unexplored future, a solution that includes faith: “...the days, impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—You are here. You must believe in something.”

In the title poem of Shearin's Moving The Piano, a piano hangs above a city street, bundled and displaced, awkward when it should be elegant, similar to her childhood of damaged Christmas trees, misunderstood pets, and untended lawns. The piano is temporarily displaced, seen differently because it is lifted away from its ordinary surroundings: suspended above the burdens of the earth. The poems in this collection also seek to hold objects and emotions aloft, to allow them to dangle above the usual landscape, allowing the reader a new vantage point. The book contains many poems that explore the particulars of life on the island of Kitty Hawk where she was a child; they pay attention to untended lawns, sunburns, turtles, motherhood, dead pets, and wilted Christmas trees. One very brief poem explains how to live without money. The collection pays notice to foxes and jellyfish, to the places where she can hear the ocean; it ponders aging and money and motherhood. Shearin says of the piano: "We cannot/ turn away from its startling/ moment of freedom, its perilous fling/ before it returns to the burdens of this earth." Her poems capture that perilous fling. Her first collection, The Owl Question, won the May Swenson Award and the poems in her second, The Empty House, helped he rwin a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared regularly in Ploughshares, The Sun, and North American Review and has been read aloud by Garrison Keillor on his show The Writer's Almanac. Recent work also appears in the Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. The poems in Moving the Piano were written over a period of three years, on the island of Kitty Hawk, with the help of grants from the NEA and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. They contain the images and emotions and ideas that she finds most compelling and moving;

This study explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. It discusses major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - and also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers.

In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.

"Attractively illustrated and engagingly written, Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind is a distinctive and distinguished contribution to English (and American) history, with much to say about the trajectories of middle-class lives, and about the changing place of women within English society during the Victorian period and beyond."--BOOK JACKET.

This cycle of poems reflects the life of Christ, by giving voice to and meditating on those closest to him and those who were touched by his earthly ministry. The defining events of the faith are explored with depth and freshness here, but also the tender moments that perhaps we consider less: Mary feeling the first movements of her baby within her, or Saint Joseph sitting beside his sleeping son. Written during Read's first ten years as a Catholic and poet in residence of the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs, the central narrative is interwoven with lyrical, contemplative pieces about God and our relationship with him. This book gives voice to what at times can seem inexpressible, bringing Christ closer by entering into his life and expressing his life in us.

Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do Theology'. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.