Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Whether it's the big-hearted hooker, the henchman priest, the fate of poor Bobby Fischer, tripping with Tom O'Leary, or the last thoughts of a dying man, we are told their secrets by the only one who knows them all, The Storyteller. Yet what haunts the mind still lingers. What is his secret, or dare we ask?
Well, here's what I think it is: I believe that each of the stories the aged one offers up contains one morsel of his mystery. When they are...
Author
Language
English
Description
In pruning, a decision must be made whether to either slowly hollow, heartwood rotting outward, / or grow from green into a fiery blaze in autumn. Pruning Burning Bushes is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of the natural and spiritual worlds with the personal and familial worlds. The book wrestles with this decision--to grow or to rot. Walking from the valley to the highest summit and back down into the depths of the canyon riverbed,...
3) Psalms
Author
Language
English
Description
These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of...
Author
Language
English
Description
Beyond All Bearing distills and illuminates moments in ordinary lives, in ordinary time, and renders them extraordinary. These poems turn the quotidian into the rhythm and the rhyme that is poetry, preserving them on the page. Some of these moments shimmer with the beauty of pansies and paperwhites out of season; some flicker with the grace of candles placed on a table at the end of a tragic day or the grace of a holy kiss; some hum with love for...
Author
Language
English
Description
Committing theology to poetry is not new, but it's not wildly common. The Sunrise Liturgy aims to do just that. It is a sequence, like liturgy, with a start and a procession and a finish. The sun does the processing, and the play on sun and Son is never far from sight. Sunrise gives the cantus firmus to this theological theme and variations, where the going is by turns easy, by turns thickly polyphonic--take a deep breath! The cantus firmus shifts...
Author
Language
English
Description
Recinos fell in love with poetry growing up on the streets, after being abandoned by immigrant Latino parents. Finding shelter in public libraries, Recinos discovered that poetry was a way to make sense of living on the streets in the pitiable condition of teen homelessness and heroin addiction. After being unofficially adopted at the age of sixteen into a white American family from Ohio that moved to New York, he began a drug-free life, went to college,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman imagines a life for an interesting, unnamed biblical character: the bleeding woman who touches Jesus in three of the gospel accounts. The first half of this poetry collection is biblical/historical fiction; the second half, after the healing touch, moves into the realm of speculative fantasy (because faith is a strange, strange thing).
Author
Language
English
Description
The work of a wonderful secular poet, Billy Collins, provides a great model for Christian writers. His Coleridge "conversation poems" allow for real play and comedy, all in the service of profundity. These are veins that have not been suitably mined by poets who have access to the larger humanity that only Jesus can provide. But there's more than comedy in this collection. The Sorrows of Mary offer a sober truth, as do the four Gospel sonnets; both...
Author
Language
English
Description
The River Dream is a collection of original proverbs that looks to continue that classic form in its search for wisdom and spirituality. Each proverb has a corresponding photo that adds meaning and substance in the same way music adds to a lyric to create a song. Breaking through the confinements of religion, these songs express a unique spiritual outlook in a simple poetic form. Many themes such as love, faith, vision, and death are explored, with...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Emerald Mandala is a spiritual shelter, a sanctuary of sorts. It is a harmony of words and rhymes to take you to far away inner places. Inside you will find fables, prayer, dilemma, and intentional absurdities. Angelic advocates wait to take you on wings widespread and destined for the heavens. Love is discussed, insights appraised, mind and spirit explored. The Emerald Mandala is a journey from which you will return changed, maybe ever so slightly,...
Author
Language
English
Description
In Painstaker, Galbraith takes stock of life, building an inventory of faith, regret, travel, parenthood, and hardship both physical and mental. These poems live in cities but remember the farm, with subjects ranging from fatherhood and machinery accidents to the uncertainties of faith. Galbraith calls on a number of absentees who are deceased, divine, distant, or too intimately known, including loved ones, lost friends, and a lobster soon to be dinner....
Author
Language
English
Description
The flashy poets and the poets with a schtick get the big audience, but it is the quiet poets whose individual poems more often linger with me. I'd trade all of Ginsberg, say, for William Bronk's six-line poem "After Bach," which derives from the cello suites the lesson that sadness "can be in part /to accept the absence of One to say it to." And it is Bronk whose work is called to mind for me by Yahia Lababidi's Barely There, in which "in embracing,...
Author
Language
English
Description
If you have never been inside of a prison, there are things you will not know about the community there. You may guess at them, but that is not the same. What it feels like. What it sounds like. What goes on there; these all define portions of what it is. These definitions, or parameters of life inside, come to you quite viscerally. You feel them in and through your skin before you actually give word or shape to understanding them. You sense before...
Author
Language
English
Description
If part of the reason for half-empty pews in our churches is the white-knuckle grip we have on overused terminology, Psalms of Gratitude and Prayer almost always finds a fresh vocabulary for such terms. But that is only one element in its success. These poems also communicate with a healthy dash of images, usually the lifeblood of poetry that pleases. It is not an easy thing to accomplish, but the author has done it. This book also offers a majority...
15) The Final Step
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The poet ceases. Something has changed. He has reached his goal but somehow remains undone. His soul has received as nourishment the odes he writes, yet he cannot rest. Or might it be possible that rest has now become enduring and no change appears to mind? Either way, he has been instructed to stop. Something has been completed even if not him. He counts the manuscripts upon the shelf. They are nine in number and the digit feels complete. The nine...
16) Ampersand: Poems
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
D.S. Martin's new poetry collection Ampersand brings together portraits & observations where the poet reflects upon artists, saints, reformers, poets, his own elderly parents, & various biblical characters--including twelve poems written for each of the twelve disciples. Ampersand--as the title suggests--brings together many disparate things, giving room for diverse reflections on human experience & the world in which we live.
Author
Language
English
Description
Liturgy is the golden chore; the ineffable becomes as practical as a calendar or a loaf of bread. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man and briefly walks among us, Love itself incarnate in the life of faith. This generous collection--in both senses of spirit and breadth--uses the liturgical year to explore the many aspects of Christian belief. In a wide variety of voices, styles, and forms, Ordinary Time (the title is deeply ironic) includes themes...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this collection of poetry, the author applies those phrases, responding to God's sometimes-dark providences with the light of Scriptural meditation. The manifold themes of the inspired Psalms shine out, giving endurance to those who wait for the Lord's deliverances, expressing a longing for justice to those who are confronted by God's enemies, interceding for mercy to those who are lost, and rejoicing in a salvation that is ever new. Throughout...
19) Winnower: Poems
Author
Language
English
Description
A collection that alternates between celebration and lament, Winnower traces the experiences of an American poet growing up in war-torn Chad, Africa.
20) Last Call: Poems
Author
Language
English
Description
Last Call is a book of poems that explores the journey and search for our elusive God. This is the journey of the soul, and the search is joined through the intimacies of everyday experiences, the confusions of relationships, the ever-present struggle with aging and mortality, and the wanderings amid the mysteries of faith. These poems reflect that, even in our uncertainty and not-knowing, we are continually summoned to live with an abiding sense...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request