Believing is not the same as Being Saved

by Lisa Martin

Overview

Lisa Martin’s new poetry collection seeks the kind of lyric truth that lives in paradox, in the dwelling together of seeming opposites such as life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt, joy and sorrow. Here readers will find a range of moods, tones, and subjects, as well as both traditional and contemporary forms—from sonnets to prose poems. This is a collection imbued with the light of an enduring, if troubled, faith. With its focus on spirit, ethics, and how to live well, Believing is not the same as Being Saved offers a tender meditation on the moments that make a life. There’s a way of speaking as if the difference matters, as if the road home is finite—everything begins and ends somewhere, like your hand in mine, or how last light fractures in the limbs of pine—while beyond my window, a coyote follows a trail into the dusk that only it can see. — from "Map for the road home"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772123296
Publisher:	The University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	02/09/2017
Series:	Robert Kroetsch Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	997 KB

About the Author

Award-winning poet, essayist, and editor Lisa Martin is the author of One Crow Sorrow (2008) and co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss (2013). She teaches literature and creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.

Table of Contents

Believing is not the same as being saved 1

I

One hundred ways to build the world 5

One thing 6

Firsts and lasts 7

Pool 8

Map for the road home 9

Memorial at Horseshoe Lake 10

The Ascension 11

Perspective 12

Sonnet for what we resolve into 13

A solstice is an astronomical event 14

Story 15

Return 16

River 17

Bill of Rights 18

Singing in the spirit 19

The song of the spirit drawing near to the body 20

A small sigh, a hard thought, enters 21

Individualism 22

Bearings 23

Survival and all other possibles 24

If we understand the laws at all 26

Still life with white roses 27

Easter at the zoo for agnostics 28

Learning to speak and not to speak 30

Things I can and cannot do 31

Preserve of the useful 32

Sonnet for the distance between us 33

Lightening up 34

Birth weight 35

Lessening 37

Stories are for transforming ourselves 38

Some of what we know about airports in the 21st century 40

Vanity 42

Conversions 44

What I believe now about us then 46

II

Dog years 51

The opposite of the heart 52

Expiration 53

Separated 55

I-Thou 57

Adultery 59

Argument 60

On being in love 61

Fidelity 62

Weeping birch 64

Theology 65

Biology 66

The fine thinking 67

Heart 69

Friendship 70

Sonnet to myself and a stranger 72

Incandescent light 73

Elegy 75

Ecstasis 78

Circles 83

Dancing the path to understanding 84

Breathing in the northern forest 85

Acknowledgements 87