Superbundantly Alive: Thomas Merton's Dance With the Feminine - Softcover

Porter, John S.; McCaslin, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1773430351 ISBN 13: 9781773430355

Publisher: Wood Lake Books,Canada, 2018

Synopsis

Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Mertons Dance with the Feminine is a unique, unified, multi-genre work that includes dialogue, imaginary letters, poems, and reflective essays by two established Canadian poets. Taking cues from Merton himself, Susan and John establish a playful, jazzy, dialogic tone superabundantly alive. This book invites participation for those who already know Mertons work and for those who are meeting this whole and broken, prophetic, whimsical, paradoxical prophet and visionary for the first time. Robert Lax once described Mertons poetry and the man himself as superabundantly alive. McCaslin and Porter prove the truth of this description in their enchanting account of the writer-mystic who now comes into his second century of stature and significance, in the words of Boris Pasternak, [a]live and burning to the end.

About this title

Review:

A captivating and enchanting, creative and imaginative look at writer-mystic Thomas Merton.

About the Author:

Susan McCaslin is a Canadian poet and Thomas Merton scholar who has published 14 volumes of poetry, including several long sequences on Thomas Merton. Susan is a Wood Lake author of a volume of essays titled Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (Wood Lake Books, 2011). Her most recent volume of poetry is Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Czanne (Quattro Books, 2016). Previous volumes include The Disarmed Heart (The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014) and Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011). The latter was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award). McCaslin has published critical essays on Merton in The Merton Seasonal, The Merton Annual, Thomas Merton: Monk on the Edge (The Thomas Merton Society of Canada), Merton and Hesychasm (Fons Vitae), and We Are Already One: Thomas Mertons Message of Hope; Reflections to Honour His Centenary (19152015). Her recent memoir is Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna, 2014). She resides in Fort Langley, British Columbia with her husband, Mark, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to save an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River. www.susanmccaslin.ca

J.S. PORTER was born in Belfast in the north of Ireland and educated at McMaster University (MA in English literature) in Hamilton, Ontario. He has been reading, thinking about, speaking about, and writing about Thomas Merton for 40 years. He has made six contributions to The Merton Seasonal, two to The Merton Annual, and three to The Merton Journal along with articles on Merton in Brick, The Antigonish Review, and other journals. Formerly culture critic for Inretro.ca, he is a columnist for Dialogue Magazine and a frequent contributor to the online journal Hamilton Arts and Letters. His books include The Thomas Merton Poems (Moonstone), an imaginative re-creation of Merton for our time; Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Literature and Spirituality (Novalis), with a chapter on Merton; Thomas Merton: Hermit at the Heart of Things (Novalis); and Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers (Seraphim Editions), with a chapter on Robert Lax. Porter is acknowledged for his literary contributions in the Canadian Whos Who. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife, Cheryl. www.spiritbookword.net

About this edition

• Publisher: Wood Lake Books,Canada
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1773430351
• ISBN 13: 9781773430355
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240