Frank X. Gaspar - Poet, Novelist - Mass for Grace of Happy Death
LINKS TO
NOVELS:
POETRY:
Mass for the Grace of a
Happy Death
Winner of the 1994 Anhinga
Prize for Poetry, Selected by Joy Harjo
These poems make an extended song, sometimes a wail, sometimes a hymn of quiet thanksgiving. We need this ceremony for reconciliation of our fragile and violent humanity with the divine impulse of beauty. —Joy Harjo Frank Gaspar's beautifully wrought poems in this exquisite book surge with the heat of human desire fueled by the luminosity of a transient grace. These are extraordinary poems—precise, musically complex, darkly radiant, and startlingly wise. Their power accrues exponentially, as Gaspar's lamentations, half-spoken prayers, and songs of the flesh and spirit collide and merge into a seamless quest for an affirmation of existence, wherein each of us must "walk so tenuously among the tenuous living." —Maurya Simon
The poems in Frank Gaspar's new book are stories of desire and the memory of desire, the longing for a full life and the nostalgia for that time when it seemed that "everything led someplace." They are the soul's record of judgement, grace, and obedience, and deserve our gratitude. —Mark Jarman
Two poems from Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death
Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death Frank X. Gaspar (Anhinga Press) 1st edition, February 1995 (70 pp.) ISBN 978-0938078388
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Frank's photo by David A. Lipton