Product Description

Winner of the Michael Hartnett Annual Poetry Award 2009

James Harpur’s fourth collection includes intimate responses to love, birth and death, and explores faith and vision in searching and unsentimental terms. His powerful poetry gives a new perspective on the travels and travails of early Irish saints and on the Syrian pillar hermit St Symeon Stylites. In these and other poems – about the Book of Kells, a monk and his `star-timetable’, and translations from Boethius – Harpur’s lyric gift finds moments of illumination and grace in the ordinary as well as the miraculous.

James Harpur has published three previous books of poetry and a translation of Boethius’s poems entitled Fortune’s Prisoner. Awards for his poetry include the 1995 British National Poetry prize, and bursaries from Cork Arts, the Arts Council, the Eric Gregory Trust and the Society of Authors. His non-fiction books include Love Burning in the Soul, an introduction to Christian mystics. He has held residencies at the Munster Literature Centre, Cork, and Exeter Cathedral. He lives in Co. Cork.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3170570 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 72 pages

From Booklist
The heart of this book consists of 13 sonnets, all but one in the voices of fifth- and sixth-century Irish saints. Each sonnet speaks of a particular of its saint’s legend; each is keenly dramatic, especially after one consults Wikipedia, say, or Catholic Encyclopedia, about its subject. The sonnets are succeeded by two monologues. In octosyllabics, James the brother of Jesus recalls the day before Christ’s arrest (intriguingly, Judas isn’t mentioned). Then and at much greater length, in iambic lines of varying length, the first Simeon Stylites, the hermit who lived on a succession of ever-higher pillars, praying, fasting, and mortifying the flesh in long periods of standing (e.g., throughout Lent), remarks on his life. Harpur’s clear imagery, musicality, and psychological penetration make all these poems vibrant with devotional passion and continue to distinguish the concluding pieces from his translation of the poems of Boethius (Fortune’s Prisoner, reviewed in this issue) and from a dramatic work on the making of The Book of Kells. Nor are the opening, personal poems, while admitting the comical, less numinous. --Ray Olson

About the Author
James Harpur was born in 1956 of Anglo-Irish parentage. He read Classics and then English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is now a freelance writer living in Ireland, with three previous collections of poetry from Anvil. Author of "Love Burning in the Soul: The Story of the Christian Mystics, from Saint Paul to Thomas Merton" (Shambhala, 2005).