Ruins of the Heart

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)></span><span style=color: rgba(32 31 30 1)>The first thing one notices in Kristjana Gunnars' poetry is the stunning beauty of her lyrical mysticism. That would make the work well worth the read but these poems do more. Restless they widen; they take in the world. Moving beyond a search for metaphysical comfort they confront age and the many faces of colonialism. Dante in his concern for broken vows offers the final wisdom: one of incompleteness. Like Kristjana we will die thirsting for a lover we've too fleetingly known. Hopefully like her we will die singing.-</span><span style=color: rgba(192 0 0 1)>DAVID CRAIG</span><span style=color: rgba(32 31 30 1)> poet author of </span><em style=color: rgba(32 31 30 1)>Easter</em><span style=color: rgba(32 31 30 1)> and </span><em style=color: rgba(32 31 30 1)>At the Bottom of the Year</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(34 34 34 1)></span>Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars is a dazzling accomplished writer of poetry fiction non-fiction and essays on aesthetics. Her readers always expect exhilarating density in her vision and her voice. <em>Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems</em> delivers both the density and the exhilaration. She evokes Augustine Dante Eliot Borges Marvell Lao Tzu Rumi as well as contemporary writers like Don McKay Thomas Merton Simone Weil Pierre Michon Marilynne Robinson Annie Dillard Jake Kennedy Edward Abbey Patti Smith and many other like-minded pilgrims.  Gunnars tackles the spiritual and profane mysteries of dailiness longing and desire and the paradoxes of love and devotion in this world <em>now</em>. I am so grateful for her eye on things. This book is a rich and wonderful weave of meditations driven by the insistencies of love and mortality and of the questioning of that love and mortality. As she herself writes 'The ordinary is the sacred.'-<span style=color: rgba(192 0 0 1)>JOHN LENT</span> author of <em>A Matins Flywheel</em> and <em>Cantilevered Songs</em></p><p> </p><p>Kristjana Gunnars' luminous profoundly intimate verse is as tender as an open sore and as strong as love. As Keats said of the best poetry 'it emboldens the soul to accept mystery' for <em>mystery-</em>of life of the self of God-invests every line every letter of her work. What an honor it is to seek passage as her spiritual companion upon this journey.-<span style=color: rgba(192 0 0 1)>MICHAEL MARTIN</span> author of <em>Sophia in Exile</em> and <em>The Submerged Reality</em></p>