homodeus: an introduction to the ineffable
homodeus: An Introduction to the Ineffable
A Selection of Poems by Joe Edwards
What lies beyond the reach of language? For more than sixty years, poet and philosopher Joe Edwards has been chasing that question - and homodeus is the luminous result.
Drawing on a lifetime of poetic practice, Edwards offers a collection that ranges from the playfully irreverent to the profoundly sublime. From the philosophical wit of Ode to the Rule - a meditation on measurement, identity, and the absurdity of being quantified - to the spare, devastating beauty of the haiku sequence, to the soaring mysticism of Hawkness, these poems move with the ease of a mind equally at home in laughter and in awe.
At the heart of the collection is Homo, Edwards's landmark long poem - a work nearly fifty years in the making - which traces the arc of human experience from the primal to the transcendent. Through the gritty vernacular of Hilda, the philosophical parable of The Lamb, and the cosmic vision of Part Two: Hawkness, Homo stands as one of the most ambitious and original long poems in contemporary American literature.
homodeus - from the Latin homo (man) and deus (God) - is a book about the space between those two words: the yearning, the reaching, the almost. It is a book for readers who believe, as Edwards does, that poetry leads us toward what cannot be said - and that the journey is worth every step.
"We all have poetry in us, and we all have those poetic moments which push us ever so slightly closer to that which cannot be bounded by the human word. Our poetry leads us toward the ineffable."
- Joe Edwards
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