This collection of studies by the eminent author Brian Keeble, a long-time friend, colleague, and editor of the poet, is a series of regards, each having a focal point that differs from its neighbors, but which nonetheless is directed towards the same subject—the poet’s singular imaginative vision.
Praise
“Kathleen Raine’s vocation pretty clearly was to become a poet of religious vision—or, more precisely, a poet of Imagination in the high sense in which Blake used that term: the ‘Divine Humanity,’ the ‘Poetic Genius,’ the ‘Spirit of Prophecy,’ the power of inspiration, the vision of eternal things, our means of conversing with Paradise. Her fidelity to her own experience and way of perceiving is one of the major qualities of her poetry. As a poet of experience, she is without recourse either to the purity of the mystics or to the abstract coherences of the philosopher. One is impressed by the extent to which the literary quality of her work is affected by concerns that far surpass the present interests of the ‘literary world.’”
—WENDELL BERRY
author of Jayber Crow,The Unsettling of America, and What Are People For?, among many other books
“The essays and the interview inthis book—the first of its kind about Kathleen Raine—will be an excellent introduction to her work for those who don’t know it, and an aid for reflecting on it for those who do. As her long-time colleague, friend, and editor, and as a fine poet, noted author, and apologist for a perennialist approach to art, Brian Keeble has an understanding of Raine’s views on poetry that she herself would recognize. For both of them, poetry is a source of the transformative energies of vision that contribute to the wholeness of life. These Bright Shadows, in short,offers the reader multiple entryways into the ‘house of the soul’ that Raine never tired of saying is poetry’s true reason for being.”
—ANDREW FRISARDI
Fellow of the Temenos Academy; author of Love’s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation
About the Author
BRIAN KEEBLE is the author of Daily Bread: Art and Work in the Reign of Quantity (2015); God and Work (2009); Art: For Whom and for What? (1998), and other essay collections as well as several collections of poetry, most recently Mask after Mask (2017). He has edited three volumes of Kathleen Raine’s essays—The Inner Journey of the Poetand Other Papers (1982), The Underlying Orderand Other Essays (2008), and That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets (2017)—and also edited her Collected Poems (2000). As the editor, designer, and publisher of Golgonooza Press in Ipswich, England, from 1974 to 2004, he published numerous volumes of writings related to the arts and the perennial philosophy, by authors such as Wendell Berry, Eric Gill, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Philip Sherrard. Keeble was one of the founders of the journal Temenos (London, 1980–1991), and is a fellow and former Council and Academic Board member of the Temenos Academy.
