A Hagiography of Heaven and Vicinity

Poetry. Religion & Spirituality. The dictionary definition of hagiography is a biography of a saint, but though some saints turn up here, Michael Joyce's A HAGIOGRAPHY OF HEAVEN AND VICINITY is more a travelogue through a unique poetic landscape where the spiritual and secular intertwine, salvation and damnation mixed, in a heady brew of cultural highbrow and pop, of past and present, the imagined and real. The book both begins and ends with images of an ordinary place upon this earth, one the placeless place of a shopping mall (where Saul of Tarsus contemplates the end of prophesy while eating sesame chicken), the other the author's memories of a street corner in Uppsala, which in its very lack of anything remarkable answers the silence of god. As this book travels the interpenetration of the sacred and the mundane, it is also a celebration, brilliantly and joyfully done.