Finding the World's Fullness

Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace. This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "e;poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire."e; Cording's task has therefore been to evoke what he calls "e;the primordial intuitions of Christianity"e;: that we live in a world we did not create; that God's immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot "e;taste and see"e; that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it. The reflections in Finding the World's Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, "e;The world's fullness is not made but found."e;