Ebook
Committing theology to poetry is not new, but it's not wildly common. The Sunrise Liturgy aims to do just that. It is a sequence, like liturgy, with a start and a procession and a finish. The sun does the processing, and the play on sun and Son is never far from sight. Sunrise gives the cantus firmus to this theological theme and variations, where the going is by turns easy, by turns thickly polyphonic--take a deep breath! The cantus firmus shifts from voice to voice, disappearing, towards year's end, beyond the audible range of human mortals. But there are other mortals in this procession of the year, "acolytes of the Holy Impotence," and under and beside and through it all flows the St. Lawrence River, le fleuve, winding across the page, a tidal presence at once natural and mystical. As are the snow geese. As is the heron. There is an attempt to wrestle with a credible theodicy, especially environmental. There is a profound penchant for the eremitic, with nods to The Cloud of Unknowing and Gregory of Nyssa. And always there is the priestly sense of "performance," enactment, and Eucharist, for this is a priest speaking.
"The Sunrise Liturgy does what it says on the cover: it
is a liturgical celebration of dawn. That is, it goes over again
and again the kind of change that a new day is--materially and
spiritually--and makes us participants in this event that makes the
entire world look different. It is constantly surprising and very
beautiful . . . It is by turns full of a Joycean exuberance and an
extraordinary stillness. . . Exciting poetry, demanding and
enlarging."
--Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
Author of Christian Imagination in Poetry and Polity
"Here is something true--steadying, vivifying. I felt lifted and
anchored by the reading. [Anderson's] distinctive narrative leaps,
her metaphoric audacity, the graceful flexibility of her poetic
mind lead us into a sensibility which amounts to a trued
world."
--Tim Lilburn
Poet and essayist
2003 Governor General's Literary Award winner
"In a world full of voices eager to tell, to lay truth out for
obedient consumption, how refreshing the buoyant, evocative,
teasing, playful--and serious--voice of The Sunrise Liturgy.
Spending time in these pages is like spending Saturday afternoon
with a fearless child."
--Michael Thompson
General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada
"The liturgists of creation, from St Francis to Thomas Traherne,
have always been a minority Magnificat. . . Here Mia Anderson joins
their throng, introduces environmentalists to the liturgical year,
challenges churchy believers with the swoops of a heron, and
juxtaposes contemporary idiom with echoes deeply textured in the
Christian tradition. The fine membranes between poetry and prayer,
prophecy and play, perception and percussion become invisible.
God's grandeur is alive once more as she hovers on the wind of the
Spirit."
--Samuel Wells
Author of God's Companions: Reimagining Christian
Ethics
''This book of distinguished, searching and lyrical poems is close
to a new mystic theology…. (it is) allusive, learned, exquisitely
accomplished in its weaving of sound, suffused with a visionary and
rapturous sense of nature, yet wryly playful at points… Compelling
movement, clear images anchored in language and situation, the
poems leap from place to thought, from thought to action, from
action to repose.''
-- Juror's Comments for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Mia Anderson is an Anglican priest in the Diocese of Quebec, and author of three books of poetry: Appetite (1988), Chateau Puits '81 (1992), and Practising Death (1997). She was for many years a theatre actor, and later a shepherd.