Grace Confounding

Thirty-one poems, the great majority written and published in the 1950s and 1960s in such magazines and journals as The Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis, as well as a selections from two of his earlier collections. His important poem, "A Hard Death," the last Wilder work to appear in Poetry (1965), is also found here. The volume's foreword, addressed to alert Christians and congregations, is an important and forthright statement of the poet's artistic world view. "Old words do not reach cross the new gulfs," Wilder writes, adding, "Does not the New Testament itself promise new tongues, new names, new songs?" In recognizing a faith that "the ancient covenant mortised in the foundations of the world still holds," readers of Amos Wilder's poetry encounter a distinguished student of the New Testament who wrestled with fresh idiom and metaphor in his search to make the scripture of the past "speak to us anew."