Vox Angelica

by Timothy Liu

Overview

In Liu's text the ascent, the ecstatic apprehension of the divine (he is a religious poet, there are no two ways about it, though perhaps there are twenty) can be effected only by a demonic insistence upon abjection, upon the descent. He shrives himself, and his poems show the marks of the lash--they are the lash--and his vision is naturalized to a degree that would astonish his predecessors, that astonishes us. This is a shocking poetry, and the shock is not of recognition, but of estrangement. It makes an unfamiliar claim upon us, the claim of apostasy. --Richard Howard, from the forward

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579940
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

Editorial Reviews

As Richard Howard observes in his extravagantly mannered introduction, Liu is a religious poet, not as an apologist for his Mormon upbringing but in the spiritual longing that suffuses his work--a longing these votive, melancholy poems (``The yellow shirt of joy hangs/ like a ghost in the moth-eaten/ heart'') unflinchingly serves. Though spare and elegant in tone, these poems contemplate disquieting subjects: incest, suicide, cancer, insanity, lovers dead and dying of AIDS. The suffering, mitigated only briefly by fleeting, often physical occasions of rapture, is always haunted by the author's loss of faith, ``that swan song in our throats/ a falling cloud of ash.'' A gifted poet, an apostate who cannot stop praying, Lui strives to make secular sacraments out of actual experience, creating outward signs of inward grace.-- Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.

Library Journal