A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877458596 ISBN 13: 9780877458593

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2003

Synopsis

Persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike throughout history and largely misunderstood by the rest of the world, Mennonites have found it difficult to make their voices heard or respected. In this anthology however, 24 poets challenge our assumptions and confront issues from identity to God.

About this title

Review

"As an intricate choral music lovingly arranged, this gathering makes manifest a rich community of accomplished voices, a community whose immediate concerns are various, whose informing circumstances diverge, but whose common chord remains apprehensible and compelling--a long devotion to peace attaining to a concurrent devotion to beauty."

"A Cappella invites the outsider to eavesdrop on a new community of American poets--representing a religious ethnic tradition dating back to 1525--which has only since the 1970s been expressed in gutsy poetry rather than hymns and sentimental verse. Although they may invoke ethnically charged images--quilts, martyrs, and shoofly pie--their poems are less charming local color than vigorous explorations of the individual in the community, of women in a man's world, of personal trauma and ecstasy, and of spiritual hope in a dark world. Ethnicity gives these usually lucid poems a tart, sometimes obscure edge, but the result is a garland of verse well worth the effort to understand and appreciate."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877458596
• ISBN 13: 9780877458593
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: USA) Ann Hostetler (Goshen College Indiana