Eternal Life and other poems

“As Jacob rolled in the mud, wrestling with an angel, so Gene Fendt’s poems grapple with the glittering, erotic, crisp cruelty of the physical world—all the time demanding the angelic blessing of the numinous within. Eternal Life and Other Poems is a volume I will return to as a way to ponder the multi-faceted wonder of the incarnation.”—FR DWIGHT LONGENECKER, author of Immortal Combat and A Sudden Certainty—Priest Poems

“Gene Fendt’s Eternal Life is a book full of poems as fresh and alive as a draught of cool water from a stream whose source reaches to the first morning. Fendt is, if nothing else, a poet of glory.”—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Mythologies of the Wild of God and Sophia in Exile

 “‘Is any creature owed what it has not received?’ A crucial question for us, we creatures who are human. Gene Fendt formulates the question only once in Eternal Life, but poses it throughout this bodied-and-souled, hawk-auspiced book. These poems demonstrate both aspects of the one answer to the question: that no creature is owed anything at all, and that everything any creature has received is beyond what was owed. Call the former mortality; call the latter grace. Call the combination miracle, and join Gene Fendt in wonder at miracle’s mark on us: that ‘Something in our cells recalls / the morning of eternity.’”—H. L. HIX, author of Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds and American Outrage

“While much modern poetry seems to deny or ignore our culture’s religious heritage, Gene Fendt’s Eternal Life and Other Poems boldly celebrates biblical figures, Church fathers, and saints. In these poems, Fendt takes us inside the minds and voices of Mary, Joseph, Augustine, and so many other important souls. This while simultaneously honoring the world the body inhabits, with all its beautiful landscapes and creatures. Fendt’s work is a poetry of the body and a poetry of the soul, together as one. The result is a celebration of flesh, mind, and spirit, rightly ordered.”—DWAINE SPIEKER, author of Odometer, editor of Homing: The Collected Poems of Don Welch, 1975–2015