Keep the Feast - by Stephen Cushman (Paperback)

About the Book

"With Keep the Feast, Stephen Cushman offers readers a collection of remarkable clarity, skill, depth, and delight. The centerpiece title poem, based on the longest biblical psalm, is a rarity in the world of contemporary poetry: a serious devotional work. Yet Cushman approaches the challenges of establishing a personal relationship with God in ways so varied and ingenious that it thoroughly entertains and intrigues as poetry, and the religious feelings and beliefs of the reader do not matter. Several of the poems in the opening and closing sections meditate on biblical events, as Cushman's combination of skepticism and devotion balances the headlong embrace of the title poem. "Rough Draft" considers Jesus's need to take a second crack at curing a blind man in the Gospel of Mark, while "Want to Make Something of It?" turns Christ's blasting of the fig tree in the same gospel into a darkly comic, strikingly angry anticipation of his sacrifice. In the rest of this captivating volume, the poet meditates on secular history, works of art, and literary figures, every poem rendered in Cushman's unique vernacular and lush rhythms, offering readers a feast for the ear and the tongue"--

Book Synopsis

Stephen Cushman's Keep the Feast sings in the tradition of the psalmists and devotional poets, offering an intimate, ecstatic doxology, both exultant and indicting, spiritual and secular. His poems make prodigious and intrepid forays into the realms of history, sexuality, religious ardor, the imperiled planet, and the reasons for making art. At the heart of this three-part book lies the title poem, which takes as a formal model Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. In luminous verse, Cushman's speaker rejoices in the commitments of faith, finding in them a way of living with the paradoxes of twenty-first-century life and of holding belief in an often-unfathomable world.

Review Quotes

"Keep the Feast is a joyride through the vicissitudes, ironies, and ecstasies of just about every precinct of human experience, from the quotidian exigencies of everyday life to the lessons of history to the heights of erotic and spiritual devotion."--Lisa Russ Spaar

"Keep the Feast is a remarkable collection of conversational, exquisitely chiseled poems that negotiate among the secular, the physical, the imaginative, and the spiritual."--Ernest Suarez

"[The book's] canny music seduces, its blasphemous wordplay titillates and shocks, and its outrageous faith utterly convinces. Cushman's rapture creates new and brilliant poetry."--Jay Rogoff

"Schooled equally in Thoreau and folklore, the poems in this book are nourishing in their humor, edifying in their precision, and enlivening all around."--Maurice Manning

About the Author

Stephen Cushman is a poet and a scholar of American literature and the Civil War. His recent books include Hothead: A Poem and The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today. He is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.