Angels & Saints

by Eliot Weinberger, Mary Wellesley (Noted by)

Overview

A gorgeously illustrated co-publication with Christine Burgin by “one of the world’s great essayists” (The New York Times). With a guide to the illustrations by Mary Wellesley.

Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.
       From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger’s lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife.
       Threaded throughout Angels & Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-“concrete” poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229869
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	626,108
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.

Dr. Mary Wellesley is a Research Affiliate at the British Library whose research focuses on medieval manuscripts. She writes and reviews widely, her work regularly appearing in the London Review of Books, Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. Her book, Hidden Hands: Manuscripts That Made Us is forthcoming.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/15/2020

Essayist Weinberger (The Ghosts of Birds) delivers a charming meditation on the nature of angels and saints, illustrated with gorgeous reproductions of the works of ninth century German Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. Weinberger contributes the bulk of the text, comprising his interpretation of angels, including consideration of how many there are, and their appearance, essential nature (“God and the angels speak without sound... and are heard by “inward” or “mental” ears”), physical abilities, and functions. Weinberger concludes his consideration with a beautifully laid out “angelology,” naming various angels and their powers, such as Mach, who can make one invisible. The rest of the volume is devoted to the stories of saints—some of which are quite lengthy, such as the biography of Saint Therese. Others are as brief as a sentence. (For John the Almsgiver, “He never spoke an idle word.”) The volume is concluded with an essay by Wellesley, a British Library researcher, on the nature and history of Maurus’s illustrations. The reproductions, scattered throughout the book, are full-color and invite the reader to contemplation. Academic and lay readers interested in Christian thought will enjoy Weinberger’s eclectic homage to angels and saints. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"In Angels & Saints, the beauty of Weinberger’s prose is itself given a visual counterpoint in the multi-colored grid poems of ninth-century Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus. Each of his sentences thrums with its own vitality. Each subject feels like it’s been granted a second life in text."

Washington Examiner - Scott Beauchamp

"My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive."

The New York Times - Gary Snyder

"A fanciful, wickedly inventive and poignant conjuration. Weinberger has made an infidel’s Book of Hours in an attempt to reinterpret a world that is more alien and insecure by the day, to imagine some things beyond the reach of search engines."

London Review of Books - Marina Warner

"Eliot Weinberger is a master essayist, a furious thinker and an exceptionally elegant writer."

Jenny Diski

"Eliot Weinberger’s Angels and Saints is glorious— a deeply scholarly and playful work, in which the mind of an essayist meets the sensibility of a poet. It is as lovely an object as its subject might require, illustrated by the grid poems of Hrabanus Maurus (circa 780–856), with an additional note on their complexities by Mary Wellesley."

NYRB - Anne Enright

"Like Thomas Aquinas before him, Weinberger is a brilliant scholar in a dark age."

Rain Taxi

2020-05-17
An eclectic look at angels and saints.

Dispensing with any sort of introduction, Weinberger delves into the subject of angels by discussing how many might exist, according to bygone Christian and Jewish sources. This disarming beginning prepares readers for an entire book of intriguing material that seems to go nowhere in particular. Combining a historian’s level of scholarship with a mystic’s sense of ambiguity, the author crafts a fascinatingly quirky work about the beings of heaven and those humans who are closest to them. His discourse on angels, making up roughly the first half of the book, explores their characteristics and origins, the existence of demons and fallen angels, the role of guardian angels, and the orders of angels. The author makes liberal use of quotes and references from Scripture, apocryphal writings, and church sources from a variety of different eras. Among his questions: Do angels have memories? Can they take on human forms? Are they capable of deception? With poetic flair, he explains that “angels are the largely anonymous workers in the hive of heaven.” Due to that anonymity, he writes, believers have had to fill in many gaps. The case is different for the saints, whose stories are more familiar. Consequently, Weinberger’s treatment of saints is simply a series of minibiographies, ranging from one sentence to two or three pages. There is no order or apparent overarching purpose, and readers will wonder why the author chose the stories of the saints that he did. The thought-provoking artwork of ninth-century Frankish monk Hrabanus Maurus enhances the text, and the book also includes a guide to the illustrations written by scholar Mary Wellesley.

Most readers will be charmed by this exploration of the divine, which is read best as an escape rather than a study tool.

Kirkus Reviews