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Angels & Saints: With a Guide to the Illustrations by Mary Wellesley
Top of the pile
76
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
64/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Eliot Weinberger, Mary Wellesley
Publisher:
New Directions
Date:
September 1, 2020
Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive?
What The Reviewers Say
A luminous book, it is illustrated with elaborate gilded grid poems by the ninth-century monk Hrabanus Maurus.
Weinberger’s...a storyteller after Benjamin’s heart, and has no truck with functionalist explanations; he relishes the unverifiable and offers no rhyme or reason for what he is passing on. He doesn’t claim that saints’ stories help keep track of time or indeed that they have any purpose at all. His distinctive poetic method...is montage, but it has something in common with the cento form, in which a poem emerges from a collage of quotations, each of them unchanged in tself, but profoundly altered by the compiler’s selection, the harmony and dissonance produced by the repetitions and sequencing.
Weinberger delivers a charming meditation on the nature of angels and saints, illustrated with gorgeous reproductions of the works of ninth century German Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus.
... eclectic.
