Epitome & Epiphany: An Abstract and an Afterpiece

Diana Starr Cooper, author of Night After Night, wrote in a letter to a friend of the author:

I still think that In the Shadowless Light [i.e., [Epiphany] is a great work of art, at a level which probably its writer could never achieve again––and given the inspiration for it, maybe no one would want to. But it’s stayed as a fixed star in the firmament for me all these years.

Epitome is a mainly prose summary of the book, And Say What He Is: The Life of a Special Child, published under pen-names (J.B. and Emily Murray) in 1975 by the MIT Press. It is also an Introduction to “In the Shadowless Light,” which was first subtitled “Meditations on the Death of a Son.” (The reader is recommended to sleep on Epitome before turning the page to read Epiphany.)

Juan Pascoe, who printed John Ridland’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at his Taller Martín Pescador in Tacámbaro, Mexico, commented, pre-publication, on the current work:

It's a pretty dense book, rich but hard to take. A dark epilogue to a tragic Shakespearean play. A trek into the intimacy of a marriage; sure, into poetry, too, but always on the edge of a knife.

A deeply religious Indian physician, Dayalan Devanesen, wrote:

I speed-read Epitome and Epiphany last night. I had a tremendous emotional response to this wonderful work. I certainly had an epiphany as I read it through. It kept transforming my concepts of human beauty and love and pushed me to transcend many ingrained stereotypes. Little John certainly lives on as the epitome of a beautiful, smiling child of God. You have placed him in a most gentle and beautiful way in spite of all the pain and anguish to live in the hearts and minds of those who read this work. Little John is indeed resurrected.

Finally, a young woman, Alexandra Umlas, who has returned to work for an MFA degree in poetry, concludes:

The poems [in Epitome] are gifts. Reading them is like being at a reading, where the poet can talk about the poem and you can hear his voice. It is very different, a much more encompassing experience than having just a poem on the page.

In “Epiphany” you truly did “set [y]our best thinking upon him,” and so the reader is blessed by the words, and by the presence of Little John, who is there, who is in the father and in the mother, and now in the reader. I welcome him into my own heart and am better for having him there. I loved the Shipap—the bright possibilities of it. “Epiphany” really is a masterpiece of metaphor and an embodiment of its power to transform.

The three drawings of Little John by Donald Lent were made on the dates indicated, the latest on the front cover, before he left UCSB to become a Professor at Bates College in Maine. These, with the back cover photograph my wife or I took in Boulder when Little John was five years old, are an essential part of the book as designed by Dowitcher Press.