These genuine prayers will inspire readers to pray despite fluctuations in one’s soul and in the world.
A collection of candid prayers that vacillate between faith and doubt, pleasure and pain, and virtue and vice.
Debut author Wilson-Sanford doesn’t sugarcoat her spiritual experiences in these prayers. Her “devotions for the ambivalent” reflect the transcendent power of prayer and spirituality but also the many human follies that keep people from such transcendence. For example, on the positive side, she writes, “To think prayer produces results / Now there’s an idea / Not just comfort or yearning as a last resort / But a force / … / Not mental shenanigans / … / But transforming energy.” On the other hand, though, she writes, “No prayer tonight / Just thrashing / Lashing out at my own distractions / Too busy being mad at me / … / Oh well / More to come.” Another theme is the importance of looking outside oneself. In one prayer, she writes, “There is a world out there / Try that on / Soldiers on any side who want to be home /… / Hungry, hungry people in a fat land / Try those lenses on.” Wilson-Sanford also includes short reflections on her own life at the beginning of each of 12 “months” containing 365 short prayers in total. In these, she describes her fluctuating faith during her youth, the strength that prayer brought her at various change-points in adulthood (including marriage, divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting), and finally, the spiritual progression of her later years. These stories, too, reflect ambivalence: “Under duress, I turned to God-ness. / During good spells, not so much.” The key characteristic of this prayer collection is its authenticity. These devotions have their ups and downs, and yet despite occasional backsliding, there’s a subtle spiritual maturation as the book goes on. The prayers wouldn’t be complete without Wilson-Sanford’s autobiographical reflections, as they give important context to both her faith and inner turmoil and provide real-life examples of the ebb and flow of life, which many readers will be able to relate to. Although there are sporadic Christian references, the author emphasizes spirituality over religiosity, sometimes even criticizing traditional religion: “Modern religion has a problem / Of being bored with itself / Yadda yadda yadda / Droning hymn.” Not all the prayers are equal in quality; some are too vague to carry great meaning, and others include language that lacks the poetic mood of other verses (“Get behind me, Monkey Mind / Shut up, Words / It’s my experience, so I’ll have it”). The vast majority, however, are full of wisdom and humor, validating readers’ own difficult spiritual journeys and encouraging them to use prayer as a means to transform themselves and the world around them. Also, if the prayers are read continuously instead of sporadically, they do begin to sound redundant and lose some of their energy; hence, they are best savored and pondered individually rather than devoured all in one sitting.
These genuine prayers will inspire readers to pray despite fluctuations in one’s soul and in the world.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9863386-0-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Red Shoe
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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