Hymns & Lamentations

Hymns and Lamentations is a meditation on the supposedly conflicting realities of deep faith and great suffering. It takes its place in the long tradition of religious literature where a personal relationship with the divine is embraced and swum through, while the equally great reality of suffering and injustice questions the very nature of belief and of God.

The fifty Lamentations are the barest outcries of a baffled humanity, and taken largely from the narratives of twentieth-century genocide and slavery (although they could stand for any time). The final eleven Lamentations constitute a sustained expression of grief over the destruction of the human body, of the soul, of belief, and finally over the apparent weakness of God.

Yet following these are fifty Hymns of praise from the point of view of one believer. These are written in the rapture that is the daily presence of God, and here many concepts are quietly taken from the world’s religious traditions—although, as with the Lamentations, “God” is the only word used, and no specific religion is ever named. Where the Lamentations are sparse and agonized, even the saddest hymn is joyful, wordy, and overflowing.

In the words of the author: “I think it’s important for the Hymns and Lamentations to be published together, for the ecstasy and anguish to answer one another, so that the question of suffering is not given a merely cynical or merely optimistic answer. It seems a small book like this can suggest the kind of religious or devotional art that makes faith possible in the first place.”