Scriptorium
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
National Poetry Series Winner
A collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith
The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences.
In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author’s East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Range (Horse and Rider) titles her linguistically graceful and formally exquisite second collection after the room in a medieval monastery that was dedicated to textual transcription. If Range's book is that room replete with texts, the central text is the Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated eighth-century manuscript of the Gospels transcribed by a monk named Eadfrith. Range frequently returns to the Lindisfarne Gospels and the bizarre methods of procuring the pigments necessary for its illumination: a yellow of "arsenic and sulfur," purple from a snail's glandular secretions, a crimson of the crushed worm's eggs from which it takes its name. The document is an effective muse for Range's imaginative talents, with its "letters traced upon the riven/ calf-skin gleams dark as fresh ash on a shriven/ penitent." Her historical engagements extend beyond the medieval, however, including references to the 18th-century fire that damaged the original Beowulf manuscript, Navajo talking code used during WWII, Celtic queen Boudicca's first-century rebellion against the Romans, and a smattering of Old English vocabulary. Range weaves in her own Appalachian history, where "the heart// of the Lord is a seam of coal gouged out/ to fuel the light in other places." In less gifted hands, the mix of forms and source material could prove too much to handle, but Range's poise shines throughout.
