O Garden-Dweller

by Laura Reece Hogan

Overview

This poetry collection reimagines the classic poetic text of the Song of Songs and considers its terrain of love and belonging in connection with how we seek out the divine today in our own backyards, literally and figuratively. The Song of Songs, found in Hebrew and Christian scripture, conveys in poetic form the intimate love between the bride and the groom, interpreted often in tradition as the human soul and the divine. The Song captures the spiritual journey of the soul toward its God through expression of the delight which the soul and the Beloved find in one another and their garden, the soul’s despair in the absence of the Beloved and the consequent experience of loss and pain, and finally the union of the soul and Beloved. This poetry chapbook is inspired by a garden and its residents, a historic drought, a wildfire and its aftermath, experience of the divine in the everyday, and the Song of Songs. Several of the poems echo moments found in the Song and other scripture, and the poems are generally arranged according to the arc of the Song.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635342710
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	07/21/2017
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Laura Reece Hogan's poetry has appeared in The Christian Century, Faith Hope and Fiction, PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience, The Penwood Review, Plum Tree Tavern, and The Windhover. She is the author of I Live, No Longer I: Paul's Spirituality of Suffering, Transformation, and Joy (Wipf & Stock, 2017), which examines the spirituality of the apostle Paul. Her essay, "The Brightness of Bones," was featured in Spirituality.

Laura earned a B.A. from Rice University in Houston, Texas, a J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and a M.A. in theology from St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California. Laura is a professed Third Order Carmelite. She lives with her family in Southern California.

Table of Contents

Behold You Were Within Me 1

The Edge of Who 2

Torchlight 4

Nocturne 5

Catch Us the Foxes 6

On Adoring You 7

Song of the Sown 8

His Emblem over Me 9

Pantoum of the Tinderbox 10

Angel of Dark and Fire 12

Earth on Fire 14

Evidence of a Burning Bush 16

Rain Comes in the Fourth Year 17

Winter Shoots 18

Sunrise after the Storm 19

Sacrament of Spring 20

The Language of Open 21

The Joy Tree 22

Some Bird Soaring 24

Organic Ink 26

Editorial Reviews

Laura Reece Hogan’s O Garden-Dweller is a twenty-first century Song of Songs—a lyrical invitation to seek the beloved among the “lilt of robin, / goldfinch warble” and the “medley / of sky and tree.” She carries us down the path to her desired destination with lovely alliteration and internal rhyme. The aptness of her word-choice delights again and again, and the subtlety of her images encourages us to dwell there.

—D.S. Martin, author of Conspiracy of Light, and editor of the Poiema Poetry Series

Laura Reece Hogan’s O Garden-Dweller takes its title from the Song of Songs, and explores the seasons of love: between man and woman, the soul and the divine. She traces the yearning toward God through the delight which the lovers find in each other and in their garden. The garden, a drought, a wildfire and its aftermath, the transcendent within the quotidian, all grow together organically to make this book work as a whole. In this garden, with its riot of apricots, mock orange, roses, morning glories, sugar maples, we feel the “sun-embered embrace,” see “the dew shine[s], / a needlework of mercy,” drink in rain after drought as “liquid mercy.” Hogan reminds us to “stop and inhale goodness,” and after reading these poems, we do, we do.

—Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves and seven other books of poetry

Laura Reece Hogan fills her debut collection to the brim with a luscious joy you will love to taste. O Garden-Dweller is notable for its full-bodied exuberance, a reach and a grasp that exceed themselves. Her poems are spiritually erotic and perhaps erotically spiritual in a way that honors the Song of Songs—and yet they wear their very own “blood-red bloom of belonging.”

—Paul J. Willis, author of Getting to Gardisky Lake and three other collections of poetry, and professor of English at Westmont College

From the Publisher