Commenting on "narrow the gate and hard the road that leads to life, and few there are who find it" (Matt 7:14), St. Benedict counsels young men not to be daunted by difficulties at the beginning. The way of the poet is like the way of the monk, writes renowned theologian Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B. In Swift, Lord, You Are Not, Father McDonnell offers this collection of spiritual poems about his personal struggle with God, coping with the discipline of the search for God--and waiting for God. Swift, Lord, You Are Not includes poems divided into four parts: "In the Beginning Was the Word: The Promise," "In the Beginning Was the Word: Fulfillment," "Along the Cloister Walk," and "Pauperizing the Coptic Lexicon." A personal essay, "Poet: Can You Start at Seventy-Five?" in which the author writes of what it means to compose poems within a monastery setting, concludes the collection. "How refreshing, this tough talking, this often irreverent singing, this late flowering into poetic form of a renowned theologian, all these fresh and subversive takes on scriptural stories together with some affecting and even anguished soundings of more directly personal themes. 'Myself must I remake,' wrote Yeats; he might well have had something like this, like the often witty and heartfelt words we find on these pages, in mind." Michael Dennis Browne, Professor of Poetry, University of Minnesota