Preface
Poetry, like all art, presses against borderlines, the too familiar, beauty too neatly packaged. It should re-imagine things, take risks, and at its best instill a radical reorientation that makes us co-creators of the world through the word. Poetry is a half-open door, inviting us into an unknown. That is what I found in crafting these poems, about the defamiliarized panoramas of church interiors I thought I knew from my studies in the Classics and Western Christian history.. This collection shakes and stretches and makes new in startling ways that poetry is best suited to capture.
How do we interpret the weight of meaning presented in multiple visions of the sacred, what moderns might term as the powerful, constructed over millennia. And yet, this vision is embodied in the ordinary. Even the angels and demons that should terrify are depicted as if mirroring our own human bodies. Through language poets have hunted the holy, and tried to domesticate what they think is knowable, but what may never be known, attempting to make visible the invisible. And somehow for me, walking into these often vast spaces, I sensed the mystery of the sacred, outside my grasp. What we are always failing to understand, this mystery rewards with absence, distance, and a greater silence. And yet here is still a presence.
This joint project let me be drawn into these visual compositions that contort, reshape, and realign borders, perspectives, colorization, coffered domes, entablatures, the theatrical undulations of concave and convex walls. I see that incarnated in these poems, some reflecting the shapes of the visual images, I think of my words as light-refracting tesserae that compose mosaics covering an inner world, at once eternally static and endlessly in motion. The content of the poems reflects an underlying questioning, and is an expression of what I call “faithful doubt”.
These sites have seen the rise and decline of empires, war, civil strife, fire, plague, the neglect of the poor, the rejection of the “Other”, from behind gilded and bejeweled enclosures. But I see there is something deeper here in the generous lives of saints, martyrs, and the servants of humanity, secular and religious, who lived, resisted, and died in service to the world. Theirs is the story of release from the prisons of wealth and power, asking us to look for a way to transform our existence into living fire.
— Royal W. Rhodes
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Poetry, like all art, presses against borderlines, the too familiar, beauty too neatly packaged. It should re-imagine things, take risks, and at its best instill a radical reorientation that makes us co-creators of the world through the word. Poetry is a half-open door, inviting us into an unknown. That is what I found in crafting these poems, about the defamiliarized panoramas of church interiors I thought I knew from my studies in the Classics and Western Christian history.. This collection shakes and stretches and makes new in startling ways that poetry is best suited to capture.
How do we interpret the weight of meaning presented in multiple visions of the sacred, what moderns might term as the powerful, constructed over millennia. And yet, this vision is embodied in the ordinary. Even the angels and demons that should terrify are depicted as if mirroring our own human bodies. Through language poets have hunted the holy, and tried to domesticate what they think is knowable, but what may never be known, attempting to make visible the invisible. And somehow for me, walking into these often vast spaces, I sensed the mystery of the sacred, outside my grasp. What we are always failing to understand, this mystery rewards with absence, distance, and a greater silence. And yet here is still a presence.
This joint project let me be drawn into these visual compositions that contort, reshape, and realign borders, perspectives, colorization, coffered domes, entablatures, the theatrical undulations of concave and convex walls. I see that incarnated in these poems, some reflecting the shapes of the visual images, I think of my words as light-refracting tesserae that compose mosaics covering an inner world, at once eternally static and endlessly in motion. The content of the poems reflects an underlying questioning, and is an expression of what I call “faithful doubt”.
These sites have seen the rise and decline of empires, war, civil strife, fire, plague, the neglect of the poor, the rejection of the “Other”, from behind gilded and bejeweled enclosures. But I see there is something deeper here in the generous lives of saints, martyrs, and the servants of humanity, secular and religious, who lived, resisted, and died in service to the world. Theirs is the story of release from the prisons of wealth and power, asking us to look for a way to transform our existence into living fire.
— Royal W. Rhodes
to the artist's preface
to the home page