BRIAN DAY HAS PUBLISHED FIVE BOOKS OF POETRYThe Daring of Paradise (2013)
The Daring of Paradise (Guernica Editions, 2013) reconfigures stories and images from multiple religions—and also from fairy tales—cracking them open to release new light. Poems probe the intense devotion in the letters of Paul and the sensuality shimmering within the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They cast lines across religious divides, gather elements of incarnate spirituality, and consider how, in our present moment, religion might speak to the body of the Earth. Both contemplative and provocative, The Daring of Paradise reveals a world shot through with desire and expands the ambit of devotional poetry, listening to “that polished emptiness pressing upon speech” and the “illicit locutions sung and fluted / through the back alleys of heaven.”
Check out his posts below for an interview, or sample readings of some of the poems from this majestic achievement. Available from Brian directly. |
“A homoerotic interfaith adventure . . . that illuminates both queer experience and all spiritual expression . . . aligns with mystical traditions yet manages to be strikingly contemporary . . . The book makes fine devotional reading, erotic reading, literary reading, wrapped into one.”
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A GENESIS STORY
How The Making came to life
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Increasingly aware of the threats of climate change and loss of biodiversity, I was drawn to learn about how this universe and this world came to be, a topic oddly absent from my education. When I read books on the development of the universe, I was struck by the way they presented a succession of events—often marvellous and stunning events—but did not sound or feel like stories. These books did not hold for me the allure, the engagement, of tales. I wondered if there might be a way to tell the universe in a way that included science and story, combining the wonders of science and human history with the thrill and imaginative appeal of story. It seemed an excessively ambitious idea, and certainly one I was incapable of realizing.
But as I thought of the universe’s development, emergences in the universe gradually found their parallel stories. Gaps remained, and I often despaired that I simply did not know the stories that would be needed for this project to come to fruition. But the stories accumulated, drawn to the science and the history, and eventually all the pairings were made. I was surprised not only that I knew so many stories but that apposite ones appeared, and that they found themselves drawn by the magnetism of the universe’s events. As I embarked on this project, I read dozens of books, some providing overviews of universal history and some treating particular periods or aspects of it. Not having a background in science, I sometimes struggled to understand what I was reading. But the outlines of the story, the signal events and emergences, became clear. These formed the foundation of the work, the basic structure of time to which the tales could be joined. The universe’s trajectory fell into major phases, which formed the six sections that take us from the beginning of time to the present. It occurred to me to add a seventh, one that peers into the future, not in the sense of being predictive or anticipating political or technological solutions, but in the sense of offering stories and images that might help us imagine and orient ourselves toward a more harmonious and life-sustaining way to proceed on this planet. Immersing myself in the creative process of the universe’s development, I found myself musing on the strangeness, complexity, and paradox of the processes by which this complexity and profusion came to be. As I considered all this, poems emerged that did not detail the process and its advancing narrative, but rather reflected upon aspects of the creative process itself. These became the poems in six-line stanzas, one in each section, that form interludes musing on the nature of the creativity in the universe, on Earth, and in human life. I also became aware of, or imagined, a kind of creative receptiveness, an attentiveness toward might yet might emerge as the next phase of development. This led to the “Listening” pieces which begin each section. It also felt necessary to extol the unfolding, the very process of creation that I was recounting. And it felt that praise was appropriate not only for the events of the world but also for the stories that accompanied them, as these to me seemed no long entirely distinct. And so at the end of each section there is a piece entitled “Praise” that exults in the phases of fact and story that have brought this world to be. |
Brian Day’s The Making is a modern epic of the human universe—incantatory, propulsive, mesmerizing in rhythm and language, in story and myth. In this engaging and immersive read, one falls deeply under the spell of creation—the scientific wonder of the universe, and the human wonder of this unique and visionary tale.
Karl Meade, author of doom eager Be dazzled and blessed by the pantheon of religious and mythical figures who join forces with science to tell the history of the universe in The Making by Brian Day. His lyrical poetry makes the most of their divinely intricate narratives, weaving multifaith threads into a satisfying whole. He centers the offbeat, embodied, under-told sides of figures ranging from Vishnu and Sky-Woman to Jesus and his angel-activated mother, crafting poetry that transcends heaven and earth. Kittredge Cherry, author of Jesus in Love: A Novel With The Making Brian Day sets himself a daunting task—to tell the story of the universe in one long poem. Astonishingly enough, he succeeds—thanks to dazzling language that’s both fierce and precise and an exhilarating vision that brings together Snow White and the Buddha, angels and electrons, dinosaurs and Muhammad to tell the one story, all the stories, our story. Day’s teeming imagination opens our hearts as well as our minds to the interdependent wonders of our multifarious universe. Murray Reiss, author of The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild With a unique voice, rich language and inspired cadence, The Making weaves the story of the universe from “the day biology was born” through legend and myth “to the bowl and the birth of the stars” through the world’s religions and on to the current climate crisis to find “not hope but hope in hope’s existence.” This poet is intimate with language and its power to transform words beyond words. Christine Smart, author of The White Crow |