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For the Lost Cathedral

Poems

84 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations

ebook available

Poetry

  Paperback / 9780807159620 / April 2015
For the Lost Cathedral delves deeply into the human relationship with the divine and its capacity for empathy, transformation, and the tolerance of difference and doubt. Bruce Bond seeks neither to praise nor to attack institutional religions, instead choosing to explore their interactions with the inner lives of those who hold them sacred. Faith can offer comfort and security in difficult times, yet it may also create the temptation to hold to absolutes. For the Lost Cathedral examines the tensions inherent in spiritual devotion as well as the impact of such devotion on our most defining conflicts, creativities, and acts of sacrifice.
 
In poems whose formal simplicity belies the depth of their complexity and insight, Bond explores a dialogue between the spiritual and the religious. A tour de force of emotional truth and focus, For the Lost Cathedral embodies a spirit of wonder in the face of difficulties that might otherwise appear intractable.
Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books, including For the Lost Cathedral, The Other Sky, and Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand. He is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Praise for For the Lost Cathedral

“In this new political climate, Bond’s recently published For the Lost Cathedral anticipates its own relevance. . . . For the Lost Cathedral is not unusual for looking at cruelty and destruction so intently; what distinguishes it is that in poem after poem we are vividly recalled to the fact that what has been destroyed was once given to flourish.”—Interim

“The capaciousness of Bond’s vision—coupled with the graceful, legato fluidity of his measured lines—resists convenient assurances of eternal truth, just as it questions the historical failures of organized religion. . . .For the Lost Cathedral may very well be the best poetry collection from 2015 you’ve yet to read. Bruce Bond may very well be the most gifted lyric poet writing in America today.”—Plume

“We begin ‘When first I came into the world’—line of basic condition, primary crisis, that reminds us of what is so easily forgotten, that one is born into the day, borne into the world, and bodily existence begins that double-life of mind, conscious of the secret of faith by being so struck by consciousness of doubt. Bruce Bond, in poems remarkable for obliterating the opposition between ferocity and fragility, knows what he shows: that we must construct the house in which our spirit dwells, line by line, brick by brick, we must invite the ‘secret life’ in so that it might come to some use. It is daily work, a kind of practice, and a strange one—the thing we build to ask it our questions: ‘What, in the end, is the use of use.’ Whatever it is, it is not obvious. Some prayer not wholly prayer, some poem that is the made-thing, whose words can be heard only by the fact of the prayer being spoken, the poem being written. These poems stand as a primary document of our ongoing condition: we are in the world, and we must provide for ourselves our gifts, our guides, must write down doubt to find the outline of faith, must speak the secret to keep it safe.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle’s Apprentice

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