This Book of Starres: Learning to Read George Herbert

by James Boyd White

Book Overview

"A real pleasure. . . . Reading this book was like revisiting a country I thought I knew well with a guide who could show me all kinds of delights I had missed in my previous sojourns. . . . A terrific, engaging book." --Michael Schoenfeldt, author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship "This Book of Starres" is one of those all-too-rare books in which an author's love of someone's work--in this case, the seventeenth-century...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472105051
• ISBN13: 9780472105052
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

updating after a few years (and a different state!)

White is an perceptive reader of poetry and theological reflections who has his own idiosyncratic but highly accesible style; all at the service of making George Herbert's poetry shine more brightly for others...not at all to stand in the spotlight himself. The "self-consuming artifacts" that Herbert constructs to effectively communicate religious truth and human uncertainty are well represented by White's own writing style, a steady candleflame that slowly and inobtrusively fades into the brighter dawn of Herbert's meditations rising into the reader's consciousness. I would recommend this book equally strongly for someone who has never heard of Herbert, or for a long-time lover of his poems and essays. (2007 note - but you'll have to look around for a used copy now, sad to say!)

An illumination for some, a deeper delving for others

White is an perceptive reader of poetry and theological reflections who has his own idiosyncratic but highly accesible style; all at the service of making George Herbert's poetry shine more brightly for others...not at all to stand in the spotlight himself. The "self-consuming artifacts" that Herbert constructs to effectively communicate religious truth and human uncertainty are well represented by White's own writing style, a steady candleflame that slowly and inobtrusively fades into the brighter dawn of Herbert's meditations rising into the reader's consciousness. I would recommend this book equally strongly for someone who has never heard of Herbert, or for a long-time lover of his poems and essays.