Books by Sydney Lea

This is the first comprehensive study in the English language of the commentaries of Didymus the Blind, who was revered as the foremost Christian scholar of the fourth century and an influential spiritual director of ascetics.   The writings of Didymus were censored and destroyed due to his posthumous condemnation for heresy. This study recovers the uncensored voice of Didymus through the commentaries among the Tura papyri, a massive set of documents discovered in an Egyptian quarry in 1941.   This neglected corpus offers an unprecedented glimpse into the internal workings of a Christian philosophical academy in the most vibrant and tumultuous cultural center of late antiquity. By exploring the social context of Christian instruction in the competitive environment of fourth-century Alexandria, Richard A. Layton elucidates the political implications of biblical interpretation.   Through detailed analysis of the commentaries on Psalms, Job, and Genesis, the author charts a profound tectonic shift in moral imagination as classical ethical vocabulary becomes indissolubly bound to biblical narrative. Attending to the complex interactions of political competition and intellectual inquiry, this study makes a unique contribution to the cultural history of late antiquity.

Co-winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for "To the Bone", Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear and unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity's place in it. This work of his is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky.

Description:These poems--selected from the award-winning poet''s output over four decades--more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.Endorsements:""The life in Sydney Lea''s poems is entirely local, whether the locale is Italy, Montana, or his home in Vermont . . . The making of the soul that occurs in Sydney Lea''s poems is intimately connected with the place where the making occurs . . . Sydney Lea''s poems show us that all spirituality is local spirituality. He is our preeminent poet of the soul''s making among local places and people.""--Mark Jarman Author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems ""Sydney Lea''s heartbreaking and heartening poems look, with the utmost honesty, at ''what we may or may not be / here on earth.'' . . . [These] urgent poems give us back the depth of our existence. With intelligence, passion, and humility, Lea embraces the task he has been given: to record those ''warming recollections'' of parents, friends, wife and children, and to acknowledge how this ''splendid universe subsumes . . . his small dumb witness'' into a ''hymn of grateful praise.''"" --Robert Cording Author of Walking with Ruskin""In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea''s affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.""--Jeanne Murray WalkerAuthor of A Deed to the Light""From his experience of doubt to his affirmation of the Mystery, the poet''s faith shows through honest and eloquent language . . . Lea''s unique gift of language opens up the most ordinary detail of village life in northern Vermont and raises it to universal significance. His compassionate gaze at suffering and loss is balanced by his embrace of nature in all its forms and by moments of ecstatic revelation.""--Robert Siegel Author of A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected PoemsAbout the Contributor(s):Sydney Lea lately retired after more than forty years of teaching at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at several European universities. Lea was a Pulitzer finalist for his volume of poems Pursuit of a Wound, and won the 1998 Poets'' Prize. He holds the doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, he founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review, one of the nation''s leading literary quarterlies. This is his tenth volume of poems; he is also author of a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness. He is currently the poet laureate of the state of Vermont.

In Sydney Lea's poems, purest joy and woe flash amid the mundane, and beauty knows the full range of nature - from the plumed tension of a newborn child twisting away from the ready breast to bright birds lying dead on the winter lawn.

Collected essays on the persistence of preoccupation and the absence of theory