Franciscan Notes

Poetry. FRANCISCAN NOTES carries us from the deaths of loved ones and the poet’s own approaching old age to the grounds of hope glimpsed at La Verna and Assisi, and from a pilgrimage to India and Japan. A wide gamut of human spiritual experience and a spot of the ecstatic, these poems form in deference to the great Rinzai Zen question, If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure? It is impossible to leave Alan Williamson’s FRANCISCAN NOTES without experiencing the inmost smile that is the response of the body and mind to intimate, authentic truth-telling. Each poem embodies processes of reckoning with the intricacies of mythmaking and unmasking in the ‘lifework’ of loving. Invoking the Franciscan spiritual practice of discernment through the ‘trinity’ of memory, intelligence, and love, Williamson unlocks in the reader expectations of sudden joy.a Kevin McIlvoy

In Alan Williamson’s FRANCISCAN NOTES, one senses at every turn a complex, shifting mind always at work on problems of mortality, family, the irretrievability of the past, and the fleeting nature of the present. The histories of literature, music, and art live in this book not as areas of academic study, but as humanizing forces, as clarifying lenses through which we can better understand the intersection of our own public and personal landscapes, our foibles, needs, and momentary brilliances. But this doesn’t begin to touch on Williamson’s ability to transform a kind of cultural erudition into work that is deeply moving on a personal level. This is marvelous collection by a poet whose work I have admired for years.a Kevin Prufer