Lift up your voice with strength, seek the Lord and His strength, and seek His presence continually. Give thanks to the Lord, call upon His name, make known His deeds among the people, and proclaim that is name alone is exalted. The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. Before Him no god was formed, nor shall there be any after Him. He is the Lord besides Him there is no savior. He is He who blots out our transgressions for His own sake and He will not remember our sins. He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul He fills with good things. He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. He rebuked the red sea and it became dry, He turns rivers into a desert, He turns desert into a pool of water, a parched land into spring of water. He provides food for those who fear Him, He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, wealth and riches are in His house. The Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and His mercy is over all that he has made, His understanding is beyond measure. He made the earth and created man on it, it was His hands that stretched out the heavens and He commanded all their host. He determines the number of stars; He gives to all of them their names. He covers the heavens with clouds; He prepares rain for the earth; He makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the beasts their food, His delight is not in the strength of the horse nor His pleasure in the legs of man, but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His steadfast love. Praise the Lord for who He is, Praise the Lord for His mighty deeds, praise Him according to His excellent greatness, praise Him in His sanctuary; praise Him in His mighty heavens. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD! Amen Prophet Joseph Patrick Oyone Meye Scribe of Christ

'A profoundly valuable collection, full of fresh perspective, and opening doors into all kinds of material that has been routinely neglected or patronized' Rowan Williams, TLS This rich and surprising anthology is a holistic, global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia. Beginning with the earliest attributable author in all of human literature, the twenty-third century BCE Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, and taking in a constellation of voices - from King David to Lao Tzu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Malian Epic of Sundiata - this selection presents a number of canonical figures like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized, diverse poets going up to the present day. Together they show the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the spiritual, across place and time.

The Bible is by far the leading source of inspiration for Western literature, and in particular, the life of Jesus has drawn the attention of artists and writers throughout the ages. Now, in a volume of astonishing range and originality, Robert Atwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal present 280 remarkable poems from world literature focusing on Jesus's life and teaching. Readers accustomed to the predictable inclusions of many anthologies will be surprised and delighted by the diversity of poets represented here, from Aquinas, Dante, de Guevara, Donne, and Sor Juana, to D.H. Lawrence, Gabriela Mistral, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Czeslaw Milosz, and Leopold Senghor. Perhaps no other thematically organized anthology could have brought together writers as different as Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Merton, Alice Walker, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jack Kerouac. Indeed, simply to turn the page in Divine Inspiration is an adventure in itself. And in terms of form, style, modulations of tone and perspective, the variety here is as unparalleled as it is unpredictable. The editors of Divine Inspiration have done a masterful job of unifying this vast assortment of poems. Organized chronologically around the life of Jesus, the book is divided into nine sections--from Birth and Infancy, through Healings and Miracles, to the Resurrection-- and presents passages from the Gospels followed by the poems they inspired. This structure gives readers the dual pleasures of a strong narrative pull punctuated by moments of lyric intensity. Our familiarity with the life of Jesus is thus enlivened, deepened, and in some cases wholly transformed by the imaginative power of the poems. In the largest section of the book, on the Passion of Jesus, we find an array of poems by Anna Akhmatova, Antonio Machado, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Unamuno, Charles Baudelaire, R.S. Thomas, Andrew Marvell, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Denise Levertov, among others. To see the Passion of Jesus refracted through the lenses of such poets is to see it anew, or more vividly than before. And to encounter Chinese, Korean, Nigerian, Arab, Latin American, Scandinavian, Hungarian, and Greek poets alongside English, French, and German is a testimony both to the editors' devoted scholarship and to the power of Jesus's life to inspire great poetry across a spectrum of cultures and eras. An invaluable sourcebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike, Divine Inspiration should prove equally satisfying to readers with a strong interest in religion and to all lovers of poetry.

How to find wisdom and spiritual sustenance in a time of crisis and uncertainty? In Divine Fire, David Woo answers with poems that move from private life into a wider world of catastrophe and renewal. The collection opens in the most personal space, a bedroom, where the chaotic intrusions of adulthood revive the bafflements of childhood. The perspective soon widens from the intimacies of love to issues of national and global import, such as race and class inequality, and then to an unspoken cataclysm that is, by turns, a spiritual apocalypse and a crisis that could be in the news today, like climate change or the pandemic. In the last part of the book, the search for ever-vaster scales of meaning, both sacred and profane, finds the poet trying on different personas and sensibilities—comic, ironic, earnest, literary, self-mythologizing— before reaching a luminous détente with the fearful and the sublime. The divine fire of lovers fading in memory—“shades of the men in my blood”—becomes the divine fire of a larger spiritual reckoning. In his new book of poems, Woo provides an astonishing vision of the world right now through his exploration of timeless themes of love, solitude, art, the body, and death.

Define Me, Divine Me: A Poetic Display of Affection is an exploration of raw truth that provokes our deepest emotions so that we may honor both the light and the dark within us all. Together, we allow the words of enlightened wisdom and painful beginnings to wash through us, as we stand back up and claim what is rightfully ours. As you devour these words with precision, you too will reflect on your own life’s journey, and realize that we are more connected than once thought. The idealism of loneliness will expire, and a new celebration of unity will take its place. Our journey inwards is never-ending, and the wisdom we are learning, we already know. It’s just a matter of removing the layers of our perceived reality and embedded beliefs to get to the core of our Eternal Self. So that we may reveal who it is that we really are: A Divine Creation of Angelic Energy. And as you choose to show the world your authentic self, you will find the peace, happiness, and love that you are seeking. Here is your new vocabulary to raise your vibration higher, or to sit with the shadows if that is what you seek. It is a creative space to nurture and inspire your restless Soul. An eclectic mix of vibrations molded into words from me to you.

Divine Animal is the debut poetry book by celebrated, Ontario-born poet and spoken word performer Brandon Wint. The collection is an elegant, expansive mapping of Brandon Wint's relationship to the legacy and wake of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as one of its living, Black descendants. The Atlantic ocean is figured as both a historical site and diasporic metaphor from which to explore the complex journeys and negotiations that brought his family to Canada from Jamaica and Barbados. Divine Animal reckons with the ways the logic of colonialism has brought humankind into an era of ecological devastation, climate change catastrophe and eco-grief. In this way, Brandon Wint offers a thoughtful, empathetic poetics that seeks to re-connect the human world with the natural world. Above all, Divine Animal is a work that lives powerfully at the intersection of celebration and grief. These poems testify to the realities of beauty on Earth, while casting a necessary eye upon the human proclivity to invent sophisticated, resilient modes of violence and inequity.