Lisa Martin's new poetry collection seeks the kind of lyric truth that lives in paradox, in the dwelling together of seeming opposites such as life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt, joy and sorrow. Here readers will find a range of moods, tones, and subjects, as well as both traditional and contemporary forms - from sonnets to prose poems. A collection imbued with the light of an enduring, if troubled, faith. With its focus on spirit, ethics, and how to live well, Believing is not the same as Being Saved offers a tender meditation on the moments that make a life. "There's a way of speaking as if the difference matters, as if the road home is finite / everything begins and ends somewhere, like your hand in mine, or how last light fractures in the limbs of pine / while beyond my window, a coyote follows a trail into the dusk that only it can see."-- from "Map for the road home." Poet, essayist, and editor Lisa Martin is the author of One Crow Sorrow (2008) and co-editor of How to Expect What You're Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss (2013). She teaches literature and creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.
General Note
Poems.
Some copies may be permabound.
Content Note
Believing is not the same as being saved -- One hundred ways to build the world -- One thing -- Firsts and lasts -- Pool -- Map for the road home -- Memorial at Horseshoe Lake -- The ascension -- Perspective -- Sonnet for what we resolve into- -- A solstice is an astronomical event -- Story -- Return -- River -- Bill of rights -- Singing in the spirit -- The song of the spirit drawing near to the body -- A small sigh, a hard thought, enters -- Individualism -- Bearings -- Survival and all other possibles -- If we understand the laws at all -- Still life with white roses -- Easter at the zoo for agnostics -- Learning to speak and not to speak -- Things I can and cannot do -- Preserve of the useful -- Sonnet for the distance between us -- Lightening up -- Birth weight -- Lessening -- Stories are for transforming ourselves -- Some of what we know about airports in the 21st century -- Vanity -- Conversions -- What I believe now about us then -- Dog years -- The opposite of the heart -- Expiration -- Separated -- I-thou -- Adultery -- Argument -- On being in love -- Fidelity -- Weeping birch -- Theology -- Biology -- The fine thinking -- Heart -- Friendship -- Sonnet to myself and a stranger -- Incandescent light -- Elegy -- Ecstasis -- Circles -- Dancing the path to understanding -- Breathing in the northern forest.