Laurance Wieder

Words to God's Music is the first complete poet's version of the Psalter since Christopher Smart's 18th-century Psalms of David. Each of these 150 poems is a unique response to the corresponding biblical psalm, and speaks to and from the heart. Some of these poems live fairly close to their biblical originals; some stand as commentaries or variations on the text; some venture afield. Neither translations nor interpretations in the strictest sense, they get to the heart of the psalms with an awareness of how they speak to both the eternal and the immediate, living moment. Revised and corrected version of the acclaimed, out-of-print 2003 edition.

This roughly chronological collection assembles the best of Laurance Wieder's poetry written over the past half-century. The poems speak in a chorus of voices, from Franz Schubert's to Goofy's, and feature the meditations of John Wayne and an Italian anarchist carpenter's take on democracy and organized religion. In his lyric dialogue with the world, Wieder's poems emerge from the ordinary to make something sensible out of the invisible.

In 23 essays published over the last quarter-century, Laurance Wieder considers Homer, Lao-tzu, Valmiki, and Lady Murasaki, medieval Hebrew poems for Yom Kippur and 20th-century American poetry, Orhan Pamuk and Evliya elebi, Miguel de Cervantes and Roberto Bola o, William Blake and John Milton, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner. This caravan of exiles and messiahs, poets and scholars, novelists and travelers, composers and artists transports the written word-that human thing which lasts.

Isaiahs sacred poetry transcends place, time, and doctrine. Isaiah's Closing Arguments is a new translation of all the prophet's Haftorot (singular: Haftarah) chanted on Sabbath mornings and on special occasions. Part one contains Isaiah's verses which accompany the first three chapters of Genesis, two chapters of Exodus, the first chapter of Leviticus, and the opening of Deuteronomy. The second group of poems are also known as the seven Haftorot of Consolation. The final orations are read on Yom Kippur, on the last day of Passover, on the Sabbath before Tisha B'Av, and to proclaim the New Moon.

"In After Adam, Laurance Wieder invents a new genre for talking about the Bible, distilling its wonders and weaving them together," (Dr. Ira Bashkow, University of Virginia)Alan Wearne calls this book "a work that instructs, intrigues, and entertains," while David Rosenberg maintains that "After Adam should be in every synagogue pew beside the Chumash, in every church pew, in every poetry pew.... Besides, it should disrupt the ongoing conventional consensus on what poetry needs to be today...." Each of the 54 chapters in this Old Testament saga corresponds with a Sabbath portion of Moses' five books, as written in the Hebrew Bible, beginning with the creation of the human and closing with the death of Moses. The minyan reading aloud from the Torah scroll every Saturday morning become Jewish Arcadians, gathered to recount the living history in tale and song.