Metaphysical Athlete

de Leif Vaage

"The poetry in this book plays with Christian scripture toward a specifically metaphysical description of the experience of G-d not unlike - though perhaps only in this regard - Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing. It also takes up doctrinal foci and liturgical forms historically important for Christian thinking, including Augustine's Confessions, Luther's Small Catechism, the topos of Christology, Karl Barth's Dogmatik im Grundriss, the O-antiphons of Advent, Augustine's City of God. Under the aegis of the athlete as traditional model for the Christian ascetic's struggle to know a truth beyond the reality of this world, at least as currently constituted, the sequence of poems traces a certain "pilgrim's progress" through the known world into "the other world hidden in its place.""--