Down in the White of the Tree

The marriage of poetry and spirituality is of course an ancient one, and in Down in the White of the Tree, Tim J. Myers works in that tradition. But his isn't conventional religious poetry, some of which, he believes, is either inadequate for genuine spiritual seeking or antithetical to it. Myers works from the larger tradition, in which Rilke speaks of God as the profoundly distant Center on whose outermost periphery we reside—and from which Hafiz can assert that the universe is "just a tambourine" for us to play against our "warm thigh[s]." These are poems of doubt, of faith, and of a profound love for the radiance we can encounter in the world.