Name: Come and See by Eric Hoffman
SKU: 7316
Price: 22.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Come and See by Eric Hoffman

$22.00

This book is a verse interpretation of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John numbers among the most important and influential texts in all of human history. With its emphasis on the word and on symbolic thought, together with the cohesiveness of its structure—its many dialogues and monologues—John lends itself to a presentation in verse, specifically the lyric form that predominates English poetry today. This verse interpretation presents John’s Gospel in an aesthetically harmonious lyric form. It is an experiment, not an exercise in scholarship. Perhaps in some defiance to poetic values, these lyrics stand as unadorned as possible, so that each acuminated image and phrase intends, as did the original Greek, to pierce the thin veil between the human and the divine, and to allow the Gospel’s symbols and metaphors, so essential to poetic discourse, to stand before us transparent as glass. —From the introduction

Description

Kind: Perfectbound
Pages: 136
Language: English
Date Published: September 2024
ISBN 978-1-962847-10-0

Praise

The Gospel of John is one of the most troubling books in the Christian canon. Its severe depiction of Jesus is unlike that of the other Gospels; it presents a supremely confident and almost uncanny figure in confrontation with the religious establishment of his day. It is a work of penetrating clarity, a poetic vision which has seized the imaginations of great artists and thinkers since it first was written. Eric Hoffman’s Come and See is a testament to the Gospel of John’s inspirational force. It is a book of signs: all that we see signifies. What if Charles Reznikoff had translated John? This, I know, is a strange question, but Hoffman’s book gives us the answer. Hoffman makes it new. Come and see. —Norman Finkelstein

One

1.
There arose, became
A man from God named John

To witness the Light
So that all might believe.

He was not the Light
But came for testimony,

The true Light that shines
On all was born into this world.

He did not bring the Word
Already come into the world,

Unrecognized and unwelcomed
By His own people.

Those that did receive Him,
Born not of flesh, nor of blood,

Nor the will of man,
Became the children of God.

And the Word became flesh.
And He fixed His tent among us.

And we witnessed the Glory
Shared by Father and Son.

And the Word was filled
With grace and truth.

Author

Eric Hoffman is the author of several books of poetry, including, most recently, Inscribed Red: Haiku Versions After Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), a translation of Sumitaku Kenshin’s Unfinished (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), and Circumference of the Sun (Dos Madres Press, 2021). He edited a new edition of Philip Pain’s Daily Meditations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) and is the author of Oppen: A Narrative (Shearsman, 2011, rev. ed. Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), a biography of poet George Oppen, among numerous other works. He lives in Connecticut.