Lent
Poems
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2024 Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
In these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.
Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary—large and small—converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments. The grotesque and the tedious, the baroque and the banal, intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life: trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium, and the warnings of strangers; these are interspersed with depictions such as Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a seventeenth century portrait sitter, and Ted Hughes's second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath. The title section explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.
Lent is an exquisite work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world—and why we still find it beautiful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of the faith-inflected latest from Cayley (Other Houses) suggests the collection's interest in religion, though it is just as fascinated by fathoming the philosophical dimensions and implication of domestic and artistic life. The opening poem, "Attention," sets the stakes for this attention: "And if repetition could itself be/ a form of attention, folding along the crease/ until the crease finds itself/ hollowing out the groove, as in marriage,/ studying the same face, the same/ permeable body." In the next piece, Cayley powerfully describes ice "thinned/ to skin" and "The frozen puddle vast/ as the ice over the earth,/ which once, perhaps,/ we all crossed" ("Ice Sheet"). Other poems feature prosaic declarations: "Childhood is a time of inexplicable passions. The genius or religious fanatic is tepid compared to the disastrous loves experienced by children," and "As Henry James wrote, an artist is one on whom nothing is lost.... This seems optimistic: it is also true of sustained personal or political cruelty." Full of delightful allusions to Sylvia Plath and others, these intelligent poems offer evocative and rewarding ruminations.
