The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent road map to meaning and connection through poetry.Where do we find magic? Peace? Connection?We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, official archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live—in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry.In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht offers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world—Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others—she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, our very being, and poetry itself.Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.
Copyright:
2004

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
368 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780374716561
Related ISBNs:
9780374292744
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Chinua Achebe. Used by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Poetry, Self-Help, Health, Mind and Body, Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet