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The Other Mountain

Rowan Williams

Cover of The Other Mountain by Rowan Williams
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Christianity
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2014)
9781847774491
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eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2014)
9781847774873
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • ...Split the wood
    and I am there, says the unfamiliar
    Lord, there where the book opens
    with the leaves nailed to the wall
    and the silent knot resolved by surgery
    into a mask gaping and staring, reading
    and being read... 

    from ‘Door’
    In The Other Mountain Rowan Williams relives moments of intense trial, when women and men are transformed in spirit, and sometimes in body also. He not only reads the signs as they appear in nature and history: he lives them through language. Imagination and language bring us close to our condition. They can witness and relive in all humility the circumstances of others, or witness nature and its revelations. His poems are informed by a sensibility shaped by Wales and by the Welsh language. They prove the reality of ‘the bright, inner freedom’ we can exercise through grace, even in a world whose stark gravity is all about us. Williams avoids the merely personal: the world exists and his imagination and faith work together to explore and celebrate what is and what might be.

    Rowan Williams was born in 1950. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-2012). He spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. Williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 and became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge ... read more
    'The handful of truly successful poems here marry [Williams'] terse precision with an unwavering search for the truth, whatever it is, however elusive it might be' - 'While the dark melts''
    Times Literary Supplement 18.12.2015
    Praise for Rowan Williams 'By his own account, Williams would wish to be "a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely". This handsome, electrically charged collection confirms the truth of his aspiration...a poet attentive to language's precise and disconcerting magic.'

    Rachel Mann, Church Times

     'These are poems of great contraries: they are stark, yet there is great hope in their bleakness; they are scholarly, yet there is simplicity beyond their scholarship; they come from head and heart. Not the priest, but the poet, bids you find comfort in their uncomfortable words. We badly need the gift of these poems.'
    Iain McGilchrist
    'His poetry opens windows on a rich and restless imagination.'
    Boyd Tonkin, Independent
    'Reading this poet, at such a period in our history, is like feeling the first drops of rain after a long season of drought.'
    A.N. Wilson, Daily Telegraph
     'It's serious, craftsmanly writing on faith, history and mortality - it's the real thing.'
    Sean O'Brien, Independent
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