The Wonder Paradox
Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent road map to meaning and connection through poetry.
Where do we find magic? Peace? Connection?
We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, official archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live—in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.
So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry.
In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht offers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world—Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others—she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, our very being, and poetry itself.
Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and historian Hecht (Doubt) designs a liturgy for a disenchanted world in this insightful outing. Noting that many who happily "live outside religion" still yearn for its sense of meaning, Hecht suggests "a shift in the way we think about ritual and the poetry of our lives"—specifically a recognition of their ability to fulfill some of humans' deepest needs. In chapters on daily practices (decisions, sleep), holidays (sabbaths, earth days), and life celebrations (weddings, funerals), Hecht shows how poetry can mark a moment, unpacking a central poem for each and suggesting accordant rituals. The "Eating" chapter offers ideas for a "private prayer over food" and analyzes Li-Young Lee poem, "Blossoms," and its "succulent/peaches we devour, dusty skin and all" (for which Hecht suggests eating is "a longing to hold what we have lost... to not let the peaches pass by"). Elsewhere, Hecht invokes Inger Christensen on gratitude and Wislawa Szymborska on holidays. Drawing on an admirable array of poets (many not Western), Hecht synthesizes artistic and spiritual insight in astute but not stuffy ways, and welcomes readers unsure where to start: "If you are looking for a... poem, but nothing rustles your chimes, pick some anyway and will grow on you." This impresses.
