On an Age-Old Anvil: Wince and Sing

Most of the poems in the first part of this book, ""Six Seasons,"" were written according to formal strictures. They use various sorts of rhyme (internal or at a line-stop) and rhythms that match the motion of their subject matter. I've worked with traditional verse: songs, carols, quatrains, lyrics with refrains, and so on. They follow the seasons of the liturgical year from Advent to the green season of Ordinary Time. The second part of the book, ""Leroy James Hopson,"" is written in free verse in order to allow for the development of a narrative with characters and a setting, an atmosphere and a plot. The entire story takes place during the night of November 10, 1974.

""Wangerin wields one of the most unique voices of our time. In his poetry, the eternal and the earthly collide and grapple with one another, and the outworking of that tension is Wangerin's hard-won gift to the reader.""
--Pete Peterson, Executive Director, The Rabbit Room

Walter Wangerin Jr. has won the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel. The author of more than forty books--including The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible (Cascade Books, 2017)--Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.