"Dense Poems and Socratic Light": The Poetry of John Martin Finlay (1941-1991)

This Wiseblood Book edition of Finlay's poetry and related writings is the most comprehensive edition to date, including many previously uncollected and unpublished materials. John Finlay's poems are almost all in traditional literary forms. Whether plain-style, narrative, or post-symbolist, Finlay's poems are serious, simple, deep, direct, and often traumatically revealing of the human condition. The best of them are truly unforgettable. Finlay addresses such subjects as the origin of the mind, the relation of mind and matter, mind and the irrational, mind and God, the nature of evil, Thomistic theology, philosophical subjectivism, the inscrutability and beauty of the natural world, primitive religious rituals, and, especially in the later poems, family life in the South since the early nineteenth century, Indian life in the South, the nature of modern war, and the isolation of the serious thinker and artist in the contemporary world. Readers who want serious poems that vividly present sensuous experience as understood by a mature mind steeped in classical and Christian tradition, yet fully aware of the problems of the contemporary world and of the perpetual threat of the primitive and the irrational, should find much here to contemplate. In their severe and uncompromising grandeur John Finlay's best poems are surely permanent additions to American literature.