Matters for You Alone
Leslie Williams
(Author)
Description
Matters for You Alone is a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames-and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade's classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events-the domestic, the mundane-in light of the eternal.
Powerful and powerless-made perfect in weakness-the speaker in these poems is fractured and dazzling, abject and hurried, courageous and fallen, you and me. At times playful, at others deadly serious, these poems ask important questions about our friends. What is the lifespan of a friendship and how might we celebrate its glories? How have our friends made us who we are? "As Seen in Frescoes Now Effaced" says it this way: "We're taught to love / by someone-a series of them- // each seeking a brief shelter / as the spirit searches / for more capacious / seas-."
A friend holds a special status-not exactly family, but often with deeper resonances of meaning and responsibility, and especially, choice. When friendships go wrong, how can we mend and heal? As "way leads on to way," how can forgiveness hold the sacred memory of others and their indelible marks on us? This book is for anyone who wants to reflect on the people in our lives from whom we've received instruction, correction, inspiration, and joy.
Product Details
| Publisher | Slant Books |
| Publish Date | May 14, 2024 |
| Pages | 84 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781639821655 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Was it Allen Grossman who wrote that a poem is about something as a cat is about the house? In the opening poem, "Moonstone, Tiger's Eye," Williams writes: "I would creep closer. I would be less / about things and more inside them." Throughout this God-haunted collection, Williams moves, chatoyant, among the flora and fauna of this world, whose primal secrets, if she attends closely, might bring her closer to knowing the ineffable "friend" (her own true self?), a friend whom her heart, over time, so prodigally and ardently seeks and cherishes, forgives, survives, and transforms.
-Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel
Leslie Williams's bright and supple poems of devotion navigate the rifts between human and divine, culture and nature, love and loss. A longing to be made new, to love with abandon, to see beauty in the dark-these are this poet's imperatives. "More and more I feel / threaded by the divine in life," Williams writes, "and what a fine needle it is." The poems in Matters for You Alone-as delicate as they are forceful-honor the spirit and the mind of creation.
-Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers
Leslie Williams writes in a rare and holy register, both wry and absolutely wonderstruck. These are poems that tell the whole truth about our world, a world of cracked lobsters, green diamonds, gangs of turkeys, broken doorknobs, shrinks for children, bleeders in ambulances, and ankle bells on Atonement Day. All this, held by that jolly, howling, uncanny God whom all psalmists know, and whom our good psalmists (like Leslie) are learning to love. Read this.
-Paul J. Pastor, author of Bower Lodge: Poems
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