Description

The result of a sustained period during which poet and novelist Richard Skinner studied mysticism and spirituality, these deft and unaffected poems seek to break down the categories and concepts that block the consciousness from God, in line with William James who described both religious and mystical experience as a ‘pure consciousness event’.
Drawing on his deep reading of poets such as Wallace Stevens, R. S. Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as theologians like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Simone Weil, Skinner sees poetry in the same way as a mystic may see prayer, i.e. as a mechanism of contemplation that might help reach what the theologian Bernard McGinn describes as a ‘place of suspended wonder’.

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