A Slender Grace
Published by Eerdmans in 2005, winner for that year of the Towson
University Prize for Literature and the Book of the Year Award from the
Conference on Christianity and Literature
Read the latest reviews
The Montserrat Review
Books and Culture
Christianity and Literature
Published by Eerdmans in 2005, winner for that year of the Towson
University Prize for Literature and the Book of the Year Award from the
Conference on Christianity and Literature
Read the latest reviews
The Montserrat Review
Books and Culture
Christianity and Literature
| All rights reserved. |
Rod Jellema
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| A Slender Grace is Rod Jellema's first collection of poetry since his highly praised The Eighth Day appeared almost twenty years ago. In this volume, which consists of 67 poems, almost all of them new, Jellema confronts a culture that loves bigness with poems that notice what is slender — the thin lines, the threads by which some things hang, the narrow crevices through which divine grace offers to reconcile humans to each other and to the Creator. These beautifully crafted pieces are not "religious poems" in the usual sense. As Jellema explains, "These poems individually are not spiritual message- bearers. Still, it is inevitable that my belief in a beautiful world that is broken and divinely redeemed — though I am not preaching about it — should be evident throughout." And it is, as Jellema takes a second, deeper look at such things as green beans in all their glory, a lovesick lonely young man in a Laundromat, and his own sense of the world while snorkeling in the Red Sea. |
What people are saying about A Slender Grace
Christianity & Literature
“Reading these chastely-chiseled compositions provides a pleasure of a high order —
health to the mind and challenges to live reflectively. They prove the truth of [Czeslaw]
Milosz’s observation that ‘One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole
wagon of elaborate prose.’”
Henry Allen
Rod Jellema writes about the real world of freight trains, Eden, dogs, death, jukeboxes,
summer houses, Nicaragua, and ice picks. He also writes about the fissures he finds in
this real world — the lonely cracks between light and dark, sound and silence, now and
then, us and ourselves. He pries at the cracks like a man opening an oyster. Inside
the oyster are transcendence and redemption. How beautiful. How real.
Barbara Brown Taylor
While more and more of us doubt our faith could pass scrutiny by the full light of day,
these poems find good news in the dark. Whether he sets us down in front of blind
Willie Johnson playing the blues or asks us to spend a night on the bare floor of a
church in Nicaragua, Rod Jellema teaches us to see what he sees — slender
revelations flung toward us by the veiled but gracious God who means to lead us home.
William Heyen
Today, with our human species on the brink of various political-ecological catastrophes,
we look for poetry that faces the worst and earns its own being. Rod Jellema’s Slender
Grace spares us nothing of our searing knowledge of Treblinka, or of the ravaged
villagers of Nicaragua, or of the persecution of artistic spirit, or of our mania in the
Middle East. His intuitive need in this “age of glare” for redemptive mystery and
darkness, as this need generates his poems, is profound and moving. This is a strong,
welcome, consoling book.
Andrew Hudgins
Rod Jellema, like most mystics, starts small and ends large. He looks into a dryer in a
Laundromat and suddenly he is at the river, pounding on his clothes with a rock —
past and present merged. He looks at a green bean and sees “the holy scent of turned
earth / slendered into a bean.” But he is a mystic who never becomes mystical; he
never loses touch with the earth. He is a poet of deep and humane good sense who’s
infused with an abiding awareness of the holy. There is much more than a slender
grace in A Slender Grace.
Linda Pastan
“The slender grace of a sudden thought / that takes you past your self. . . .” Rod
Jellema could be describing moments in so many of these thoughtful, beautifully
realized poems, whether they are describing green beans or van Gogh or an Eden after
the fall. This is perhaps his strongest collection.
Henry Taylor
Rod Jellema regards a various world with love and patience, and records with energetic
precision his encounters with it. His sense of a brief instant’s emotional weight is
unerring.
John H. Timmerman
I have been reading Rod Jellema’s beautifully crafted poetry for the better part of three
decades, each time having my sense of wonder refreshed. With A Slender Grace Rod
captures whole and clean Joseph Conrad’s description of the writer’s task: “He speaks
to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”
What a stunning, perfectly controlled work this is, with that same depth of wisdom,
insight, and mystery that readers have learned to associate with Rod. The illuminating
introduction, moreover, in itself makes the volume worthwhile.
Laurance Wieder
In A Slender Grace Rod Jellema sounds like the spiritual heir of Henry Vaughan. His
verse essays, epistles, meditations, and disquisitions upon things and emotions
wrestle with what really matters — how to live, finding and valuing love, loss, and
music. His poems are latter-day dialogues of self-and-soul.
Midwest Book Review
"A Slender Grace is emotional, captivating, deftly penned, and speaks directly to the
heart in a body of inspiring work urging the reader to never surrender to despair."
Christianity and Literature
“Jellema’s focus may well be on the minute, yet the scope of the poet’s vision is, by no
means, small…. These are wise poems that seek to teach us to be patient, to dwell in
mystery, ‘to be unafraid in the dark.’”
Christianity & Literature
“Reading these chastely-chiseled compositions provides a pleasure of a high order —
health to the mind and challenges to live reflectively. They prove the truth of [Czeslaw]
Milosz’s observation that ‘One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole
wagon of elaborate prose.’”
Henry Allen
Rod Jellema writes about the real world of freight trains, Eden, dogs, death, jukeboxes,
summer houses, Nicaragua, and ice picks. He also writes about the fissures he finds in
this real world — the lonely cracks between light and dark, sound and silence, now and
then, us and ourselves. He pries at the cracks like a man opening an oyster. Inside
the oyster are transcendence and redemption. How beautiful. How real.
Barbara Brown Taylor
While more and more of us doubt our faith could pass scrutiny by the full light of day,
these poems find good news in the dark. Whether he sets us down in front of blind
Willie Johnson playing the blues or asks us to spend a night on the bare floor of a
church in Nicaragua, Rod Jellema teaches us to see what he sees — slender
revelations flung toward us by the veiled but gracious God who means to lead us home.
William Heyen
Today, with our human species on the brink of various political-ecological catastrophes,
we look for poetry that faces the worst and earns its own being. Rod Jellema’s Slender
Grace spares us nothing of our searing knowledge of Treblinka, or of the ravaged
villagers of Nicaragua, or of the persecution of artistic spirit, or of our mania in the
Middle East. His intuitive need in this “age of glare” for redemptive mystery and
darkness, as this need generates his poems, is profound and moving. This is a strong,
welcome, consoling book.
Andrew Hudgins
Rod Jellema, like most mystics, starts small and ends large. He looks into a dryer in a
Laundromat and suddenly he is at the river, pounding on his clothes with a rock —
past and present merged. He looks at a green bean and sees “the holy scent of turned
earth / slendered into a bean.” But he is a mystic who never becomes mystical; he
never loses touch with the earth. He is a poet of deep and humane good sense who’s
infused with an abiding awareness of the holy. There is much more than a slender
grace in A Slender Grace.
Linda Pastan
“The slender grace of a sudden thought / that takes you past your self. . . .” Rod
Jellema could be describing moments in so many of these thoughtful, beautifully
realized poems, whether they are describing green beans or van Gogh or an Eden after
the fall. This is perhaps his strongest collection.
Henry Taylor
Rod Jellema regards a various world with love and patience, and records with energetic
precision his encounters with it. His sense of a brief instant’s emotional weight is
unerring.
John H. Timmerman
I have been reading Rod Jellema’s beautifully crafted poetry for the better part of three
decades, each time having my sense of wonder refreshed. With A Slender Grace Rod
captures whole and clean Joseph Conrad’s description of the writer’s task: “He speaks
to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”
What a stunning, perfectly controlled work this is, with that same depth of wisdom,
insight, and mystery that readers have learned to associate with Rod. The illuminating
introduction, moreover, in itself makes the volume worthwhile.
Laurance Wieder
In A Slender Grace Rod Jellema sounds like the spiritual heir of Henry Vaughan. His
verse essays, epistles, meditations, and disquisitions upon things and emotions
wrestle with what really matters — how to live, finding and valuing love, loss, and
music. His poems are latter-day dialogues of self-and-soul.
Midwest Book Review
"A Slender Grace is emotional, captivating, deftly penned, and speaks directly to the
heart in a body of inspiring work urging the reader to never surrender to despair."
Christianity and Literature
“Jellema’s focus may well be on the minute, yet the scope of the poet’s vision is, by no
means, small…. These are wise poems that seek to teach us to be patient, to dwell in
mystery, ‘to be unafraid in the dark.’”
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