The paperback edition of a very successful and in some ways remarkable book, first published in 1973. Gerald Brenan is well known for his 'expository' works on Spanish history and literature, and now in his eighties he has returned to an early interest in the Spanish mystics to produce an absorbing study of St John of the Cross, one of the foremost of Catholic mystics and poets. The book is perhaps the first in English to combine an objective - but sensitive and lively - account of St John's life with a fresh translation (by Mr Brenan's associate Lynda Nicholson) of his verse.

St. John (San Juan de la Cruz) is one of the greatest mystics and poets in any language. This is a new introduction and translation of St. John'' poetry (presented in both Spanish and English) and prose commentaries that includes his biography, providing an integrated vision that resurrects the power of his poetic voice.

St John of the Cross testifies to a God who longs to meet us in our deepest need. Whilst rejection and imprisonment played their part in the life of this sixteenth-century Spanish friar, John's poetry and prose reveal the beauty and power of a wondrous God. It gives us courage to believe in the possibility of change in our own lives, however unlikely or impossible this may seem. Father Iain Matthew uses this classic inspirational Christian writing as his starting point, and offers five interpretations which make its richness relevant to the modern reader.

Selected as a Winner of the National Poetry Series by Mary Jo Bang Sarah Vap’s sixth work of poetry, Viability is an ambitious and highly imaginative collection of prose poems that braids together several kinds of language strands in an effort to understand and to ask questions about the bodies (and minds, maybe even souls) that are owned by capitalism. These threads of language include definitions from an online financial dictionary, samples from an essay on the economics of slavery, quotations from an article about slavery in today’s Thai fishing industry, lyric bits and pieces about pregnancy and infants of all kinds, and a wealth of quotations falsely attributed to John of the Cross. The viability that Vap is asking about is primarily economic and biological (but not only). The questions of viability become entwined with the need, across the book, to “increase”—in both a capitalist and a gestational sense. John of the Cross tries, at first with composure, to comment on or to mediate between all the different strands of the collection.

COPY 2 LOCATED IN STACK.