005 One Is Found First / Gaelan Gilbert / December 2018
Revelation (2005), Acrylic on canvas
About the Book Gaelan Gilbert’s poetry imitates the process of living growth. In his work, imagery, allusion, and rhyme accumulate with ardent momentum, syntactic branches and leaves unfurling from the root and ground of lived experience. Like a wave adapting its contours to an unseen continental shelf, or a liturgical procession marching and swaying on its course, these poems move.
This collection’s title, One Is Found First, implies a relationship with and movement toward what is beyond oneself. It evokes the spiritual axiom that each seeker is first sought; that God initiates the process of communion, finding us so that we may find Him: “not just knowing about, but being known,” as one poem in the volume puts it. These poems strive to explore and reflect such paradoxes of encounter and transformation.
About the Poet Gaelan Gilbert is the Headmaster of Christ the Savior Academy in Wichita, KS, and Visiting Professor of Arts & Humanities at the University of Saint Katherine in San Diego, CA. He has studied and taught in Greece, France, England, and Canada. His poetry has appeared in journals such as St. Katherine Review, The Latent Print, Stroboscope, and Windhover. He lives with his wife Megan and their three children. He is a tonsured Reader in the Orthodox Church.
One Is Found First will be available in a softcover edition. Additionally, a limited hardcover edition of 25 copies, numbered and signed by the poet, will be offered.
All Poetry and Artwork: copyright 2018 by Gaelan Gilbert. All rights reserved.
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Now Available: A Secret Language by Arthur Machen
“…it is impossible to write of anything without writing of God; and this is true of the simple, homely things, as well as of the splendid, glowing and illustrious things. The secret language is spoken everywhere and by all creatures.”
Drawing a curious and splendid arc, Arthur Machen examines reason, religion, art and the comforts of common life in this short, yet rich essay. In all things, he detects a mystical syntax whispering throughout the material world and all human life. By speaking so frankly in this example of his nonfiction work, the master artist points to the subtle patterns in the tapestry of his greatest fiction.
Written in his eccentric style, A Secret Language serves both as a literary manifesto in miniature and a cogent elucidation of the author’s approach to Christian mysticism.
First published in an obscure journal, Arthur Machen’s essay has largely languished out of print since the 1920s. In a continuing effort to examine the Welsh writer’s works and thought, Darkly Bright Press is pleased to offer A Secret Language as a limited edition chapbook. In addition to new annotations to the text, this edition includes rare supplementary material regarding Machen’s masterly novella, The Great Return.
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