The Work of Creation: Selected Prose

by Luke Hankins

Overview

In The Work of Creation, poet, editor, and translator Luke Hankins explores literature, art, aesthetics, ethics, religion, and the life of the spirit in a number of genres, including literary criticism, meditations on art and aesthetics, personal essays, and interviews. Collected in this volume are pieces that have appeared in such places as Books & Culture, Contemporary Poetry Review, Image, The Writer's Chronicle, and the American Public Media national radio program "On Being." "In his generous and illuminating volume of prose, Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites. . . . [T]he book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude, a love of work, and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book." --Bruce Bond, author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand "This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening--listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry, culture, and history: the soul." --Claire Bateman, author of Leap and Scrape Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). Hankins serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and he is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625643605
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	01/11/2016
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. He is also the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. His latest book is a collection of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems (Seagull Books, 2018). Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xv

I Criticism

The Poem as Devotional Practice 3

The Lasting Model of the 17th-century English Religious Poets

Which I Is I? 17

A Review of Books by Scott Cairns, Tarfia Faizullah, and Franz Wright

Metaphysical Courage 31

A Review of Bruce Beasley's Theophobia

The Soul's Country 40

A review of Patrice de la Tour du Pin's Psalms of All My Days, translated by Jennifer Grotz

Paradise Re-Lost 47

A Review of Claudia Emerson's Late Wife

Masterful Variations 51

A Review of Ashley Anna McHugf's into These Knots

Writing From a Life 56

A Review of Carl Phillips' Riding Westward

A Second Experience 59

A Review of Two Books by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

Ignorance and Awe 65

A Review of Stephen Haven's Dust and Bread

A Kind of Grace 69

A Review or Morri Creech's Field Knowledge

The Poet and the Priest 71

A Review of Spencer Reece's The Road to Emmaus

An Auxiliar Light 76

Reciprocdl Experience in The Prelude

II Commentary & Personal Essays

On Virtuosity and Simplicity 91

A Way of Happening 94

Some Thoughts on "Art for Art's Sake"

Art in a Time of War 96

A Piece of Advice 99

Some Thoughts on Value in Art 100

The Paris Review Poetry Purge 104

Some Ethical & Professional Considerations

Beautiful Truths? 110

Reason and Fundamentalist Christianity

The Purpose of Religious and Aesthetic Experience 118

Magnanimous Despair 120

Exorcism 128

The Way They Loved Each Other 130

III Interviews

An Interview at American Literary Review 135

An Interview at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact 142

With translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

Bibliography 155

About the Author 159

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In his generous and illuminating volume of prose, Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites. . . . [T]he book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude, a love of work, and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book."
—Bruce Bond, author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand

"This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening—listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry, culture, and history: the soul."
—Claire Bateman, author of Leap and Scape

''In his newest book, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose, poet, editor, translator, and literary critic Luke Hankins 'continue[s] to work out' not his 'salvation with fear and trembling,' but the very process and scope of creation itself as it applies to the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual. The book spans Hankins's many roles as writer-scholar. It is precisely this combination of insightful scholarly attention and boldly personal meditations that makes this collection a 'work of creation.'''
—Marjorie Maddox Hafer, Anglican Theological Review

Editorial Reviews

"In his generous and illuminating volume of prose, Hankins demonstrates how much of poetry and the maturation of our engagement with it rely upon a power to contain opposites. . . . [T]he book honors a radiance of doubt that eschews both easy ironies and dogmatic polemics. The subtext here is gratitude, a love of work, and a deepening summons to the complexity of art as bound to the complexity of our condition. A beautiful book."
—Bruce Bond, author of Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand

"This collection is tuned to the pitch of listening—listening with fine intelligence as Hankins explores the nuances of poetry, culture, and history: the soul."
—Claire Bateman, author of Leap and Scape

''In his newest book, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose, poet, editor, translator, and literary critic Luke Hankins 'continue[s] to work out' not his 'salvation with fear and trembling,' but the very process and scope of creation itself as it applies to the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual. The book spans Hankins's many roles as writer-scholar. It is precisely this combination of insightful scholarly attention and boldly personal meditations that makes this collection a 'work of creation.'''
—Marjorie Maddox Hafer, Anglican Theological Review

From the Publisher