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Angels & Saints: With a Guide to the Illustrations by Mary Wellesley
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About This Book
Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host. From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger's lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife. Threaded throughout Angels & Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-"concrete" poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.
Reviews
"The reproductions, scattered throughout the book, are full-color and invite the reader to contemplation."
"There is no order or apparent overarching purpose, and readers will wonder why the author chose the stories of the saints that he did."
"A luminous book, it is illustrated with elaborate gilded grid poems by the ninth-century monk Hrabanus Maurus ..."
"Weinberger's...a storyteller after Benjamin's heart, and has no truck with functionalist explanations; he relishes the unverifiable and offers no rhyme or reason for what he is passing on."
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