Product Description
This adventure story recounts the first round-world voyage of Tudor explorer Sir Francis Drake through the eyes of Dickon, a lame stowaway, who goes on to become Drake's cabin boy and personal hero. Readers learn about the harsh life that sailors in Tudor times experienced as they coped with storms, mutinies and illness on board ship./ Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction./ Text type - An adventure story./ Provides lots of opportunities for drama and writing activities. This title is paired with: How to be a Tudor in 20 easy stages, an information book that can be used to locate factual information about Tudor explorers and the Armada./ Curriculum links - History: What were the effects of Tudor exploration? ... Read more

Product Description
How do some of our best poets reflect death in their opaque art? What do their death poems tell us about our lives, about our faith -- and the objects of our faith -- and about the shape of our doubt?

Acquainted with the Night is a study of death as it appears in the work of a handful of contemporary poets -- Geoffrey Hill, Scott Cairns, Mark Jarman, R. S. Thomas, and Wendell Berry. The primary focus throughout is directed to the appearance of death, and to the physical and metaphorical darkness often associated with the thought of death, in their poems. Jeffrey Johnson's commentary frames each poet's work within observations by literary artists and critics, theologians, cultural critics, and scholars of religion, providing a Christian appreciation of each poet's work within a context of tradition and circumstances.

Readers equipped -- however lightly -- with the words of scripture and the mandates of faith may find in these poems terms of reference, rhythms, images, themes, and concerns that strike sympathetic chords and enrich the experience of faith and life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very dissapointing approach to an interesting topic
I was very disappointed by this book, since it does not offer what the (sub)title The shadow of Death in Contemporary Poetry" promises. The product description is absolutely right with its statement "Christian appreciation" for two reasons: The book does not only lack a critical questioning of the way death is presented poetically but is also written from a Christian and therefore religiously uncritical perspective. But what I found even more disappointing is that Jeffrey Johnson seems to be focusing more on topics like faith, worship, spiritual darkness, silence in churches or even kneeling from a Christian perspective rather than on death and its threads on mankind. I even have the impression he presents his own opinion on these topic, uses the Bible to fortify it and then looks how the poems could fit in. This is why oftentimes there isn't even a connection between the poetry verses he quotes and what he's been writing before or after. Also this book does not fulfill the criteria of a literary study. The poems are not analyzed for it's literary devices and techniques and even hardly any symbols are looked at. The main focus in this book is content. An other weak point is that the poems are never looked on as a whole but that Johnson keeps quoting random verses without clarifying its context within a poem, the whole work of a poet or the biographical data.

In sentences like Christian writers provide a corrective to our death-denying culture" Johnson proves to be utterly unaware of the scientific discussion on the question whether death in modern society is really pushed aside or rather "pornographized" (e.g. Max Scheler vs. Geoffrey Gorer).

So my main criticism is that a) death is not the or a central aspect in this book, b) that Johnson seems to randomly jump from one poem quote to another, c) that literary aspects as well as the context of modernism and the world wars are totally ignored and d) that he appears very uncritical about the presentation of death and its meaning.

Nevertheless the interface of poetry and death is a very interesting subject that not much research has been done on so far. Perhaps a better and more fitting title for Johnson's work would have been something like "Encouraging Christian words regarding death and faith in modern American and Welsh Poetry". ... Read more

Product Description
237 pages. This issue celebrates 25 issues. Printed in Canada. ... Read more