Ebook
The Hay and the Barn is a joyful, profound poetic meditation, based on the penultimate year of Gabrielle Bossis's devotional classic, He and I. One might even call it a conversation. Jesus reveals Himself in both her entries and in the poems which come out of them. (This should not surprise us, as He does so in every moment of our lives.) In this book we see Bossis move toward her last passage, and we are privileged to see Our Lord lovingly lay the groundwork for their ecstatic meeting. We get to witness His great tenderness. What we see is a kind of tender memento mori.
“I was quite moved by this collection, often deeply moved. David Craig is a poet of the incarnation: his verse stubbornly, persistently finds the hidden and veiled God manifest in the people, places, sights, and sounds of a real human life. A beautiful and moving bouquet of devotional verse.”
—Aaron Urbanczyk, professor of English, Franciscan University
“In a transtemporal collaboration in the communion of saints, David Craig makes the words of modern mystic Gabrielle Bossis a lamp for the way through a year of poems. Craig’s verses ring with his characteristic turning to Christ in all situations amid a recounting of every-telling—and just-often-enough-outlandish—details of everyday life. His regular nod to suffering and bodily death grounds these poems in extra heft, but a heft balanced by a poet’s gratitude for life’s greatest gifts: the sacraments, devoted relationships, leaves and breezes, the chance to glimpse the trinity’s glory in the smallness of it all.”
—Jacob Riyeff, associate professor of English, Marquette University