The bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses forty poems from across the centuries that express the universal experience of loss and reflects on them in order to draw out the comfort, understanding and hope they offer. Some of the poems will be familiar, many will be new, but together they provide a sure companion for the journey across difficult terrain. Some of Malcolm’s own poetry is included, written out of his work as a priest with the dying and the bereaved and giving to the volume a powerful authenticity. The choice of forty poems is significant and reflects an ancient practice still observed in some European and Middle Eastern societies of taking extra-special care of a bereaved person in the forty days following a death – our word quarantine come from this. They explore the nature and the risk of love, the pain of letting go and look toward glimpses of resurrection.

The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. Hear the prophet's lament as the necessary corrective for Christianity's future.

The single most comprehensive study of elegy, this Handbook offers groundbreaking scholarship, historical breadth, and responds to recent exciting developments in elegy studies: the explosion in interest in elegies about AIDS, cancer, and war; the reconsideration of the role of women; and elegy's relation to ethics, philosophy, and theory.

A lecture that discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. It puts forward the view that The Lament for Arthur O'Leary, composed by Eileen O'Connell, is among the finest examples of the lamentation of the dead."

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

Book of Lamentations features some of the most haunting poetry in the bible. It is a traditional "city lament" mourning the desertion of the city its god, its destruction, and the ultimate return of the divinity, and partly a funeral dirge in which the bereaved bewails and addresses the dead. Lamentations consists of five distinct poems, corresponding to its five chapters. Authorship has traditionally been ascribed to Jeremiah but one clue that there may be multiple authors is that the gender and situation of the first-person witness changes: the narration is feminine in the first and second lamentation, and masculine in the third, while the fourth and fifth are eyewitness reports of Jerusalem's destruction. The poems probably originated from Judeans who remained in the land, although scholars are divided over whether they are the work of one or multiple authors. Included in this anthology are five different versions and the Matthew Henry commentary: The King James Version Douay-Rheims Version The American Standard Version Bible in Basic English Version Webster Bible Version The Matthew Henry analysis