ISBN: 0-88739-538-4
64 pp.
Size:
Pub Date: 03/2003
Paperback Original
Price: $15.00
|
Birth in the Family, A
El León Literary Arts
Norma Farber
Poet, concert singer, actress, novelist, translator; wife, mother, grandmother, widow. Norma Farber (1909-1984) was the author of more than thirty books. Her poems appeared in periodicals including The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
In the manger story, Norma Farber found the purity and potential which the birth of any child may signify, as well as the enchantment that compelled creatures of field and forest. Illustrated by artists including Petra Mathers, and set to music by composers including Daniel Pinkham, the nativity poems of Norma Farber continue to bring alive this extraordinary moment of harmony and promise.
Review: "Here we are fed by the lovely, quirky music of Norma Farber's hosannas. These poems are votaries, little fires Farber lights one by one as we turn the pages. Playful, somber, weighted with the foreshadow of sorrow, these flames burn steady, sure-giving off, in their aggregate, a fine and indelible heat."
-Paulann Petersen, author of The Wild Awake
"This series of poems opens to us a new way of reading Jesus' birth, at once simple and elegant. To accomplish this, the poet has brought together elements of what we think of as Christian culture, a loosely-connected body of lore centered around the baby Jesus: speaking animals, folk tales, parable, myth, legend, and so on, all bound in a lucid beautifully turned prosody. The breadth of tone in these terse lyrics is striking, a reflection of the complexity of the miraculous event."
-Leonard Nathan, author of The Potato Eaters
Bio: El León's publisher THOMAS FARBER has been awarded Guggenheim and, three times, National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative non-fiction. He was a Fulbright Scholar for Pacific Island Studies, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation resident scholar at Bellagio. Farber is Senior Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
|
