Description:
The Seven cycles of poetry--rooted in each of Christ's Seven Last Words--intend a unified philosophical and theological dwelling. Here, the poet begins from the irresistible force of finality, the very wager of existence itself, and makes herself dialogic magnet, working to draw in and draw out the core of the human and divine relationship. On Good Friday, we are taught the poetry of our Lord. It is an inlaying of our words imbedded in the Word, a submersion into the delectation, anguish, thirst, neediness, ecstasy, and the surrender of the dying God.
If that first and often lasting invitation into faith, not faith in general but this faith and this Person, Christ, is given to us through Beauty, it is the monumental task of the artist to help us experience the Beautiful, to recover Beauty in our lives. Each of the cycles of poems pertaining to the Seven Last Words will be accompanied by art by co-author and artist Carol Scott. Here, the unabashedly Beautiful reanimates those lost wells of experience so that we can, once again, feel the poetizing Word enfleshed, Word made flesh, the Word of our flesh human and divine.
Brief description: Carol Scott is professor emeritus of art at University of Holy Cross, New Orleans, receiving several endowed professorships. She is a gallery artist at Gallery 600 Julia in the prestigious Arts District of New Orleans. The City of New Orleans selected her work for their permanent collection. Carol served as vice president of the Women's Caucus for Art. She has had numerous one-person shows, exhibited in galleries and museums, won awards, and is collected nationally and internationally.
Review Quotes:
"It is hard to say enough in praise of the writings of Caitlin Smith Gilson and the art of Carol Scott. Their sheer audacity in speaking and painting so vividly and vulnerably about God's created order and the mysteries of redemption is already gift enough. In these co-authored poems, they have raised their evocation of the divine mysteries of creation and redemption, ecstatic eros (in the face of bitter thanatos) and agape, to a still higher intensity. Utterly stunning."
--Matthew Levering, chair of theology, Mundelein Seminary
"A symphony of words exquisitely wrought from flesh united to the crucified Word made flesh."
--Margaret McCarthy, associate professor of theological anthropology, Pontifical John Paul II Institute
"Evoking Claudel's Poet Before the Cross and the erotic poetics of medieval mysticism, Luminous Darkness dwells in the exposed space of divine and human suffering. It invites readers to contemplate both the enfleshed poetry of the dying Christ as well as the glorious miscellany of ordinary life: hawks, honeybees, glaciers, fire, bones, salt, petals, candles, rosary beads, glass--and above all, bodies in the ecstasies of pleasure and pain--are here transfigured by holy desire."
--Jennifer Newsome Martin, associate professor of theology, University of Notre Dame