Testament

Testament is an imaginative improvisation on the Bible that engages with the intensities, the ups and downs, of existence in our complex and fragmented world.

Psalter, the first part, comprises 150 psalm-like poems that sound the depths and heights of life lived in the presence of God. Here, shaped into powerful, accessible poetry, is the wisdom of a mature and practical faith that knows love, grief, doubt, fear, disappointment, and overwhelming delight and joy. Micheal O’Siadhail stretches heart, mind, and imagination to open up profound questions of God, suffering and aging, truth and trust, freedom and surprise, desire and love. There are passionate exchanges with God and daring leaps of insight. Through them all runs a gripping conversational relationship expressed in praise, thanks, lament, and distilled wisdom, embracing a dazzling variety of forms and rhythms.

Gospel, the second part, retells in poetry stories from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The emphasis is on the plain sense of the stories, newly imagined. We are invited to reread them, to discover insights and nuances, angles and depths, and above all to encounter afresh the familiar yet endlessly mysterious central character—Jesus. The world’s bestselling book shows yet again its capacity to excite and inspire.

O’Siadhail’s acclaimed The Five Quintets engaged with the ways in which the arts, economics, politics, the sciences, philosophy, and theology have shaped our twenty-first-century world. Here in Testament is an imaginative faith and wise spirituality that can inspire day-to-day living in that world, revealed through the inner life and penetrating discernment of a great poet.