These thirty-three poems that cast light into the darkness and promise to wake readers from their spiritual apathy, selected by Clinton Collister and Daniel Rattelle, reflect on the permanent things that make life worth living. Shouldn’t poetry invite us into a tradition that unites us with the living, the dead, and the unborn? Shouldn’t poetry move us with music, meaning and story? Ranging from James Matthew Wilson and Marly Youmans to David Middleton and Sally Thomas, these poets tell us about woodworkers and priests, hermits and students, gardeners and clerks who sojourn in a world charged with the grandeur of God.
“The Slumbering Host is an important part of the resistance to our late postmodern literary culture. The poets in this anthology have rejected the poetry of brutalism spawned by Ezra Pound, and have instead embraced spirituality and traditional poetic craft. These poems collected by Clinton Collister and Daniel Rattelle display music, grace, and ambition.”
—A.M Juster
‘The editors of this volume are rightly cautious about any exclusive notion of ‘Christian poetry’ or premature claims of a ‘Christian literary revival’. And yet these Christian-inflected poems exhibit both a seriousness and a musicality too often lacking in contemporary secular work. This is achieved by directness and honesty of observation and exploration, against a background of ultimate metaphysical questioning. The tone and idiom is at once classical and romantic, but without any self-conscious rigidities of form that would inhibit a measured fluidity. A certain stylistic step-back is evidenced, that for now may be right, perhaps presaging future steps forward of an alternative kind to our prevailing expectations of the innovative.’
—John Milbank
” The Slumbering Host remembers for us—the poems remember “what perhaps we wish the past had been,” summoning voices not often heard, resonances from Ovid, Yeats, and Donne. The poets remember the tastes and sounds and colors of words, and most of all, their meanings. Unlike the obscurest rants of current headlines and rattling licentious verse of many contemporary writers, these poems and their poets do “not hasten words” but slowly beckon them to come and speak. In their poems, these words are defamiliarized and rekindled with fire. We can read these poems and know what the words mean. The poems ensembled in this collection call for us to listen to what we thought we knew and perhaps forgot, that truth is true and beauty is beautiful and goodness can be made once more.”
—Jessica Hooten Wilson