Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe
and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who
has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that
includes selections from her earlier books of poetry, Dark Milk, The
Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God, A Sabbath Among the
Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence, draws on her life's work, more than
forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest
for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and
political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes,
for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the
committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous
activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural
world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the
voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and
earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look
at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality,
and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and
write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this
collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages
in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past
and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its
violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its
unexpected possibilities.
