Explores how poetry is necessary to prayer, illustrated from the Psalms, Isaiah and Caedmon's Hymn.

About the Author Roger Nash is the author of seven books of poetry. His poetry and short-fiction are widely published across Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.A., and have won numerous awards, including the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario, where he is Poet Laureate.

Roger Nash has the ability to discover the magical qualities of ordinary objects and actions. In Night Flying, his third collection of poems, things are not always what they seem. Women become windows, a paddle "recovers slowly from the numbness of its wooden limb," deep lake water is "a suddenly dilated passive black pupil." These lyrical poems portray a world where inanimate objects are given life, and where the barriers between life and death are sometimes imperceptible.

"The poetry in this collection explores insights that paradoxes point to in our lives, as energizing antidotes to bland generalities. What's the present, when past and future erupt into it? Can truth be found among our very errors? Can we speak beyond the limits of language? Do we all live in the same world, if different animals see it differently? There are many sorts of poems here, about love, family, farming, war, nature ... seeking a wider view of life in our age."--

Zigzags , a collection of Nash's latest poetry, explores how virtually none of our thoughts, actions or feelings go very far without becoming paradoxes and contradictions. Some paradoxes are humourous, but some are deadly. The poems debunk an intellectualism that pretends we can strategize straight lines of progress to our goals. Rather, "Life's walking a straight zigzag, while standing upright in a somersault" (Irish saying). Zigzags replaces this intellectualism with a vision of life and ourselves expressed in the harmonizing metaphors of poetry.