A highly intimate rendering of one person’s attempt at religious insight.
Carty presents a collection of Christian poems.
The structure of this collection is bound together by some vague information that the uninitiated reader—that is, probably anyone who is more than a couple of degrees removed from its publication—is probably not privy to. The “footprints” of the title is a reference to another poem, published back in 1963, as this book informs us, that describes a twin set of footprints along a beach, one belonging to a man and the other to God. This poem is clearly the inspiration for the current collection, which takes off with the same theme and imagery. As a vehicle for the poems themselves, the book contains a nearly pure outpouring of religious emotion. At its most coherent, some of the longer poems read a bit like a sermon. Elsewhere, short poems, tied together by innocent rhymes, are full of, or based on, an abundance of biblical imagery, mostly about the writer’s relationship with God. From the strange pixelated image on the cover to the free-flowing verse and loose grammar, the entire project has an unrefined feel. In place of polish, the overwhelming veneer consists of raw religious feeling, and the writing is driven by a deeply personal, sentimental Christian spirituality. The work is not scholarly, beyond the casual biblical reference, and the poetry is not particularly crafted—but this does not seem to be the point. Rather, through these poems the author seems to be translating her own spiritual experience, presenting an interpretation of the way religion has woven itself through her life, and perhaps with a bit of moralizing, her understanding of the role it is meant to play for people more broadly.
A highly intimate rendering of one person’s attempt at religious insight.Pub Date: July 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1418448530
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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