Beliefs and Blasphemies: A Collection of Poems
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.53 (502 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0812992458 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 124 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-08-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The conclusion? "Some myths are too terrible for our believing." "Goddesses First" muses about the primacy of female deities in many religious myths. Beliefs and Blasphemies will appeal to anyone who has ever thought about first things or final things--anyone who enjoys speculating about how we got here and where we're going--and it will reconfirm its author's stature as a national treasure.From the Hardcover edition.. Adair devotes her attention to a single theme, religion, but in her brilliant performance the theme's variations turn out to be wide and deep--from reverence to iconoclasm, from comedy to profundity, from joy to lament. Beliefs and Blasphemies exhibits the same qualities--accessibility, deep feeling, wisdom, humor, and technical brilliance--that made Virginia Hamilton Adair's first collection of poems, Ants on the Melon, into a bestseller and a literary landmark. If you are looking for Hallmark platitudes or E-Z faith, look elsewhere.In "Saving the Songs," for example, we reconsider Martin Luther's penchant for recycling barroom tunes into hymns: "Said Luther of the singing in saloons,/'Why should the devil have the choicest tunes?'" More soberly, in "The Reassem-blage," we are asked to test the extremes of the Christian version of the hereafter--"one a verdict brutal beyond imagination,/the other by most reports an eternity of boredom"--against
SENIOR WRITING This is the second book of poems by the youthful 85 year old Virginia Adair. She has more vitality and imagination and more sensuality than poets 1/10th her age. In this book she takes on the cosmic issues of life and death and God, sometimes somberly, and sometimes with humor.Adair. "Exercising the Third Eye" according to L. Lawson. Mrs. Adair has produced a charming and illuminating volume of poems with a spiritual theme. Most are very personal and deeply evocative, and her voice is clearly one of strong and fulfilling belief in Christ. The brevity of the volume makes it a welcome read, again and again.
This time around, she narrows her focus to a single issue, albeit one with (literally) infinite ramifications: religion. In a series of concise, vigorous lyrics, she considered everything from motherhood to Hiroshima to her own glaucoma-induced blindness. Their souls were already fed; their stomachs were empty. Along with providing the deep satisfactions of an assured poetic voice, Adair's debut also whetted the appetite for more. These are some of the wittier poems about eternity. In "Sermon on the Sermon," for example, Adair manages some expert mockery without ever succumbing to shallow skepticism: Let us skip for a moment the beatitudes and get down to the refreshments. The picnic part. Elsewhere she varies her attack from light-verse flippancy to a deep, Yeatsian reverence. --Bob Brandeis. "Is there some cosmic lab / where the stars conspire, invent