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- The White Fire of Time
A stunning new work by a profound poetic talent.
In this exquisitely coherent new collection of poems, Ellen Hinsey explores the boundary between poetry and metaphysics, and the intimate bonds between morality and mortality. Drawing on philosophical and spiritual readings, The White Fire of Time displays a breadth of cultural knowledge and a deep understanding of the wisdom of the body. The poems in this book-length sequence are gorgeous, brooding, musical, elegant and serious. The work is composed in three sections: The World, meditations on the ordinary, the daily life of the body and its place in nature and time; The Temple, investigations into language and the ethical life; and The Celestial Ladder, in which poems trace the soul's spiraling journey through desire, love, grief and endurance. Each section mirrors the structure of the whole, with poems following specific forms, serving to create a symphonic rhythm in which details, metaphors and meanings build and interweave.
""This is one of the most intellectually and spiritually ennobling books I have encountered, reminiscent of the writings of the great works of cosmogony and mysticism. It is the work of a true poet, whose sense of line, cadence and tonality is unsurpassed among poets of her generation.""
~Carolyn Forché, author of The Angel of History
""The White Fire of Time is a cantata, a poem of praise, resonating with the Dante of The Divine Comedy and the Milton of Paradise Lost. The strengths of this collection are its immediacy and the care, precision and purity of its diction. It is rare that such lapidary language accrues such music.""
~Honor Moore, author of Darling
"This is one of the most intellectually and spiritually ennobling books I have encountered, reminiscent of the writings of the great works of cosmogony and mysticism. It is the work of a true poet, whose sense of line, cadence and tonality is unsurpassed among poets of her generation."
~Carolyn Forché, author of The Angel of History