Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace

In accessible, lyrical prose, Jeff Gundy takes on poetry, peace, heresy, martyr stories, music, metaphor, and more in this sequel to his award-winning Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing. Is there a tradition that is at once rebellious, deeply communal, wildly individual, and truly peaceable? If we recognize and create it, Gundy insists, the answer is yes. Donald Revell, Author, Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems, says that "Time was that American writing was intent upon entirety. Language was pilgrimage, and cadence kept the rhythms of a motive faith. It was a time of outrageous piety (whose upper register is poetry) and joyful critique (whose upper register is poetry)-the time of Thoreau's Week and Whitman's Specimen Days and Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare. I am pleased to say that, in Gundy's Songs, that time is now." Jean Janzen, Author, Entering the Wild: Essays on Faith and Writing and many poetry volumes, affirms that "With his lively prose and inquiring spirit, Gundy woos us into his poetic exploration of theology, a fertile journey through the complications of belief, desire, and mystery, which leads to an open table of love, generosity, beauty, and hope. This book feeds the soul." As Gregory Wolfe, Editor, Image, observes, "Yeats once said: 'We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.' Gundy's rich, evocative book shows how Mennonite writers have made poetry out of their lover's quarrel with the Anabaptist tradition. In his graceful exposition we see how tradition and transgression are intertwined in one generative, ongoing story." And Scott Holland, in the Foreword, reports that "Reading Gundy's Songs, I smiled in delight and satisfaction at a writer whose deep soul is simultaneously Romantic, Anabaptist, and Transcendental."