This book invites the reader into a cloister of poems, there to look with eyes of faith through the arches of rhythm and rhyme onto the wide vistas, terrible chasms, and hazy mountains of Mystery, Beauty, and Love. Written by monks of Silverstream Priory, some poems let memory and imagination search the corners of the earth, there to glean the sorrows, hopes, and joys of men, and so present them to the Father. Others draw from the deep wells of tradition, with verse translations of ancient Latin hymns, or new compositions in that Catholic tongue. From there, gazing upwards, free verse explores the dark night of the soul, only to discover a sky star-speckled with the hope of immortality. Themes such as spiritual darkness, search, and self-gift, are juxtaposed with pieces composed for recreation celebrations of various brothers' name days. Poems that exult in the beauty of nature find a place beside ones which meditate the economy of salvation in Scripture, the Liturgy, and religious life.
A brief authors' preface explains the provenance of the poems and the different sections of the book. On one level, they move from time to eternity, from the created to the uncreated. Dawn is a daily beginning; spring, a yearly resurrection and transition; the cross, an eternal reality in which time is subsumed and redeemed. They also interweave the interior and subjective with the exterior and objective. Tears spring from what we experience; we perceive the exterior world by the created lights of the universe and are led into the eternal; supernatural peace drops down into our hearts and minds as a gift of God that surpasses nature, a result of God's redemptive realities.
