The Fall and Other Poems - Softcover

Bottum, J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587312506 ISBN 13: 9781587312502

Publisher: St. Augustines Press, 2001

Synopsis

The Fall and Other Poems

About this title

Reviews

Bottum is a regular contributor to First Things, the magazine of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, in which many of the poems in this collection first appeared. If you detect a Christian sensibility in the book, you are only properly attentive. The title of the longest poem in it is a clue, of course: "The Fall," not "Fall," although it is about autumn in New England. Like many other poems here, it is rife with religious feeling, conjured by a declaration like "The world is kindling for the Lord," by the coincidence of biblical town names, and by the hopeful, grateful questions that conclude it: "What mercy after such forgiveness? / What resurrection waits on spring?" The celebration of the beauty of purely earthly things, the acknowledgment of human inadequacy and contingency, and the thankfulness "for broken things" that Bottum asks for in the opening poem, "Baptism," are constants throughout poems that display considerable formal and tonal variety. Exemplary religiously informed poetry. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587312506
• ISBN 13: 9781587312502
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 65