The Longing: Poems

Beneath the noise and errands of everyday life, there is a longing, a yearning. What precisely we long for is not always clear; indeed, perhaps it is many things. Or perhaps it is finally one thing, the One that is behind and beneath all things. Paul Hooker probes this longing in the poem cycle of this book, exploring poetically the yearning that underlies life, love, work, worship, and faith itself. In the collections ""Traditions"" and ""Transitions,"" he explores that longing in both biblical and experiential contexts. And in the concluding essay, ""Sightings of the Holy,"" he meditates on four poems and the glimpses they provide of the Holy, a reality accessible only out of the corners of one's eyes.

About the Author :
Paul K. Hooker is retired from a career as a Presbyterian pastor, presbytery executive, and professor of practical theology. He has published books and articles in the field of Hebrew Bible studies and Presbyterian polity. He is also the author of two previous volumes of poetry, Days and Times and The Hole in the Heart of God. He and his wife live in northeast Georgia, equidistant from grandchildren and trout streams.

Review :
"In The Longing, Paul Hooker bids us to follow his journey, a pilgrimage where surprises continue to create tension and discovery that lead to certainty and questioning. His poetry evokes a sense of anticipation, curiosity, and wonder, priming the reader to engage with immediate feelings spurred by irony, nostalgia, certainty, and more in the poetry. Here we discover that it is longing that connects us, and longing is the journey we embark upon as creation and Creator." --Ashley R. Sanders, pastor, Presbyterian Church on Edisto Island "To borrow Paul Hooker's verb, the Holy 'peeks' through the words, the silences, the lines of both the poems and the prose on these pages. To read this book is to embark on a pilgrimage whose end will return you, dust to dust, to the beginning, as one whose longing has been deepened, enlarged, amazed." --Cynthia Jarvis, pastor emerita, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill "Paul Hooker's The Longing offers an arc of meditations on absence that is somehow presence, or its inverse, which in Hooker's writing blurs into the same thing. Blurred, too, are any lines between divine and earthly, of holy and not. What do you know of these things? Hooker challenges the reader to take what they think they know, and think they don't, and look again." --Kimbol Soques, poet and theopoetics scholar "The poems of The Longing are the work of a mind partly wizened. Withered are certainties and naivetes familiar to people, like Hooker, of Christian faith and church. What endures are erudition, mental alacrity, creativity. Newborn is honest embrace of ambiguity, and suspicion that no signifier is more ambiguous than 'God.' The effect is typically unsettling, at times disturbing, but consistently provocative, evocative, and productive." --William Greenway, professor of philosophical theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary