Years, Months, and Days: Second Edition

(Paperback, 2nd New edition)

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A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018

A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving meditation on the possibility of translation. Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Luke Hathaway explores the connection between hymn and poem. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is an offering of words to music, made in the spirit of a shared love-for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms-that animates poem and prayer alike.

Reviews

Praise for Years, Months, and Days

"Elegant, spare, and quiet, and, like the hymns these poems transfigure, like a prayer set to music."
Casey Plett, author of On Community and Little Fish

"Vespers. Devotional. Breathtakingly sparse. Elegant. Wondrous. Moving. Rare."
Kirby, author ofPoetry Is Queer

"[Years, Months, and Days] is carried by [Hathaway's] obvious respect for [his] sponsoring material and by [his] superb ear."
New York Times

"Exquisite . . . deeply resonant . . . . Theres often a metaphysical cast to his forthright observations, which makes them both evocative and poignant."
Toronto Star

"[Luke Hathaway's] small and beautiful book should be on your bedside table even if it is as heaped as mine. Just 4 by 5 and fewer than 70 pages, the book consists of untitled, spare, and simply-worded poems which evoke the cycles of life, the seasons, and human longing for meaning and connection. The poems expand in your head, opening your mind to matters beyond the day-to-day."
Arc Poetry Magazine

"The poems are tiny, seeds only, bare of flourish, each containing the germ of an idea so large the mind can hardly hold it . . . . If you seek to tune those numbered days of yours to what is most frightfully vital, you might carry this book in your satchel awhile. Its tiny enough to conceal in a large pocket, but it thunders, and its seeds carry fields."
Image

"Singular . . . stirring . . . invites pauses and contemplation. It is [Hathaway's] keen sense of what is essential that guides . . . these meditations."
Hamilton Review of Books

"An elegant little book . . . [Hathaway] crafts pithy yet piercing poems that echo in the mind."
Canadian Literature

Author Bio

Luke Hathaway is an internationally-acclaimed poet, lyricist/librettist, and theatre-maker. Of his 2022 book The Affirmations, Times critic Graeme Richardson writes: "Mainstream poetry counts as non-conformist compared with popular culture, but it nevertheless develops its own conformities . . . Luke Hathaway, a Canadian trans poet, offers . . . a point of difference. Influenced by John Donne and George Herbert, and above all by T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Hathaway constructs small marvels of what one poem here calls 'loving jugglery': a feast of transformations." Hathaway is a co-creator of the immersive opera Eurydice Fragments (re:naissance opera, 2024), the song-cycle The Sign of Jonas (Milltown Records, 2024), and many other performance works. He teaches English and creative writing at Saint Mary's University.