The Saint Mary's Book of Christian Verse brings together the work of poets from across the English-speaking world to celebrate the sacred art of poetry in all of its pied beauty. Chosen by the acclaimed Newman scholar Edward Short, the collection captures not only the range but the richness of Christian verse. The last comparable anthology of Christian poetry to appear was Donald Davie's Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981): a proper successor, one more reflective of the true scope and variety of Christian poetry, has been long overdue. The Saint Mary's Book of Christian Verse supplies that need with a dazzling compilation encompassing eight centuries of Christian verse by poets extending from Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton and Henry Vaughan to William Cowper, Isaac Watts, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Dana Gioia. In between, readers will find poems about faith, hope, love, loss, praise, rejoicing, mortality and immortality from such beloved poets as St. Robert Southwell, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Wallace Stevens, Charles Causley, Elizabeth Jennings, James McAuley, and Richard Wilbur. A perfect anthology for schools, colleges and the general reader, The Saint Mary's Book of Christian Verse will serve as a welcome reaffirmation for readers around the world of how vital Christian verse has been and remains to our deeply humanizing, deeply civilizing Christian inheritance.
Author Biography:
Edward Short is the author of Newman and his Contemporaries(2011), Newman and his Family (2013) and Newman and History(2017), as well as Adventures in the Book Pages (2015), which the Catholic Herald called 'wise, witty and entertaining.' His critical edition of Newman's Anglican Difficulties (2021) looks at what the great convert made of the false and brazen things at the heart of establishments. His latest collection of essays, What the Bells Sang(2022), includes wide-ranging pieces on poets, novelists, moralists, and historians. He lives in New York with his wife and two children Dana Gioia is an internationally recognized poet, critic, and former Poet Laureate of California. He is the author of five collections of verse, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which was awarded the Poets' Prize. His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, and The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays (2019whose title essay started an international debate about the role of faith in contemporary literature. Gioia has also written four opera libretti and edited over twenty anthologies. For six years he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia has been awarded 11 honorary doctorates. He has also received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, Aiken-Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and Presidential Citizens Medal. For nine years he was the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he hosted the first Catholic Literary Imagination conference in 2015
