Kirjahaku

This is the first comprehensive study in the English language of the commentaries of Didymus the Blind, who was revered as the foremost Christian scholar of the fourth century and an influential spiritual director of ascetics. The writings of Didymus were censored and destroyed due to his posthumous condemnation for heresy. This study recovers the uncensored voice of Didymus through the commentaries among the Tura papyri, a massive set of documents discovered in an Egyptian quarry in 1941. This neglected corpus offers an unprecedented glimpse into the internal workings of a Christian philosophical academy in the most vibrant and tumultuous cultural center of late antiquity. By exploring the social context of Christian instruction in the competitive environment of fourth-century Alexandria, Richard A. Layton elucidates the political implications of biblical interpretation. Through detailed analysis of the commentaries on Psalms, Job, and Genesis, the author charts a profound tectonic shift in moral imagination as classical ethical vocabulary becomes indissolubly bound to biblical narrative. Attending to the complex interactions of political competition and intellectual inquiry, this study makes a unique contribution to the cultural history of late antiquity.

Co-winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for his collection To the Bone, Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear and unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity's place in it. His latest work, Pursuit of a Wound, is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky and the dispossessed. Delving in equal measure into the flinty northern New England landscape and the exiled souls of ordinary people, Pursuit of a Wound moves beyond Lea's previous work to explore new poetic strategies, including some that approach prose poetry. Combining a free-ranging sensibility akin to Whitman's with a keen attention to verse's formal possibilities, this collection of twenty-eight new poems evokes a beautiful and threatened place and ratifies Lea's status as heir-apparent to Robert Frost.

In A Hundred Himalayas, Sydney Lea has collected a group of essays written over 30 years, representing what he refers to as the persistence of preoccupations and the absence of theory---a group of speculations, each one a single Himalaya, together a great elevation achieved in small increments. His musings on his own "favored genius," Robert Frost, his own approach to literary criticism, imagination, the American nature essay, rural life, the process of writing a poem, and fitting writing into everyday life all combine to create a picture of the things that interest Lea. "If there is grandeur at all in this volume," he says, "then, it must come in small increments." All of his small increments of gentle and insightful writing combine to create a collection that is, indeed, grand.

In A Hundred Himalayas, Sydney Lea has collected a group of essays written over 30 years, representing what he refers to as the persistence of preoccupations and the absence of theory---a group of speculations, each one a single Himalaya, together a great elevation achieved in small increments. His musings on his own "favored genius," Robert Frost, his own approach to literary criticism, imagination, the American nature essay, rural life, the process of writing a poem, and fitting writing into everyday life all combine to create a picture of the things that interest Lea. "If there is grandeur at all in this volume," he says, "then, it must come in small increments." All of his small increments of gentle and insightful writing combine to create a collection that is, indeed, grand.

In Sydney Lea’s poems, purest joy and woe flash amid the mundane, and beauty knows the full range of nature—from the plumed tension of a newborn child twisting away from the ready breast to bright birds lying dead on the winter lawn. Many of these poems are backward looking, savoring the gentle pause at summer’s end, recalling with fledgling hope former victories of spring, seeking in the woeful host of memory something that has held its charge.

What’s the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long is, in many ways, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of this ongoing search. By turns elegiac, humorous, sad, joyful, angry –and often many of these at once– this book of extremely short prose reflections entertains an abiding question for Lea: to what extent does “my” version of what happens in this life and in the world at large coincide with some imagined “real” version? If the author had an opinionated, positive answer to such a question when young, life has imposed a degree of humility upon him in older age, whether he wants it or not.What’s the Story? is less notable, then, for the conclusions it reaches at any given point than for its compelling witness to what poet Wallace Stevens called “the mind in the act of finding what will suffice.”

“So good it hurts to read.”—Annie ProulxSet against a backdrop of the remote northern Maine wilderness, Now, Look is a novel about second chances and missed chances. Fishing, hunting, and the pleasures of outdoor life bring together a mismatched pair of friends—weaving back and forth between past and present, it follows the friendship of ivy-league educated George Mayes and semi-literate woodsman and logger Evan Butcher. George, a drunk from his college days has a critical, life-changing moment of insight, and begins postgraduate life, however improbably, as a reckless school bus driver. After getting clean and sober, he develops a successful school transportation business. Having taken a number of trips to the north woods, he has come to know and revere Evan. At the story’s opening, Evan is a store of knowledge, decency, and even of wisdom. But after a series of horrendous family tragedies he begins to succumb to alcohol himself.

The unlikely friendship between professor Brant Healey and Louis, an unlettered, superstitious woodsman, is at the heart of A Place in Mind. These two men love fishing and hunting, the rural Maine landscape, whiskey from tin cups, and the stories that emerge around campfires by cold rivers.

What does a good long ramble in the woods tell us about our shared experiences, our loneliness. Is it possible to shed our civilized layers of defensive behavior, our fear of unmasking and discovery, of the unknown or once-known and forgotten? Join celebrated outdoorsman and poet Sydney Lea as he walks off into his beloved New England woods on a vision quest that touches everyone who reads along to keep him company. One's own shape-shifting powers come into focus in the light of Lea's surprising discoveries and revelations.

Sydney Lea says he hopes these columns will continue to be of interest to poetry lovers and students, but above all to the common reader. Seeking at every turn to avoid jargon, he explores how the making of a poet's art resembles the making of any reader's life. For Lea, poetry and everyday life are deeply entangled.

“Singer of stories, lyric raconteur, Sydney Lea has evolved—through a long, rich career—into one of America’s most harrowing and honest poets. Ghost Pain is his most eloquent and wrenching book.”—T.R. Hummer “Ghost Pain is a remarkable book, which takes his work to a new level.”—Stephen Dunn The eighth poetry collection by the founder of New England Review explores addiction, alcoholism, violence and the uses and inadequacies of art.

“Singer of stories, lyric raconteur, Sydney Lea has evolved—through a long, rich career—into one of America’s most harrowing and honest poets. Ghost Pain is his most eloquent and wrenching book.”—T.R. Hummer “Ghost Pain is a remarkable book, which takes his work to a new level.”—Stephen Dunn The eighth poetry collection by the founder of New England Review explores addiction, alcoholism, violence and the uses and inadequacies of art.