Poetic Revelations. Edited by Mark S. Burrows, Jean Ward, and Malgorzata Grzegorzewska

This volume of essays explores the revelatory power of poetry. The central thematic that binds these pieces, written by European, British, and American scholars, has to do with the way bodied experience relates us to each other and locates us in this world. The voices presented in this collection examine a range of poets, theologians, and philosophers, from antiquity to the contemporary scene. The approach throughout is interdisciplinary, with a broad ecumenical sensibility. Among the wide range of themes considered are the following: poetry and the remaking of the world (essays by Sir Michael Edwards, Kevin Grove, CSC, Krystyna Wierybicka-Trwoga, Sonia Jaworska, and Anna Walczuk); poetry as the shaping of the self (essays by Richard Viladesau, Marta Gibinska, Mark S. Burrows, Bradford William Manderfield, and Malgoryata Grzegorzewska), and the poem as body enclosed in language (essays by Angela Leighton, Francesca Bugliani Knox, Monika Szuba, Joanna Socko, Jean Ward), with an epilogue by David Brown on poetry as a vehicle of divine presence.

Poet and literary critic Jay Parini, reviewing the volume, observes that "this is one of those rare collections that comes a true symposium, a dialectic, with voices rooted in thought, scholarship, adn the imagination employed at a high level. The intersection of flesh and word has long been at the core of theological and poetic discourse. But here - in fifteen deeply considered essays by some of our best critics and religious thinkers - we get a profoundly nuanced, inspiring sequence of interlocking pieces. Taken as a whole, Poetic Revelations delivers what it proimises, taking us into what T. S. Eliot called 'the heart of light'. THe light burns here, and readers will delight in the illumination." Author of Why Poetry Matters as well as six collections of poetry, several biographers, and other volumes.