About this ebook
Surpassing Pleasure pulls hard in two directions. Launching for ‘the every-coloured light / streaming through the bright rose-window,’ or savouring ‘flow caught longing for the ground,’ the poems arrive at surprised moments of fusion; for instance, the poet Li Po in ‘Overboard’ who, in his attempt to embrace the moon’s reflection on the water, comes to ‘rest on the bottom of / the duckpond.’
Whether straining at the leash of formal constraints like a watchdog ‘hot on the trail of his own release’ ... or nestling into them like ‘bees nuzzling into ... rain-wet petals,’ Slater combines density and compression with an expressive, fluent music. Open forms, even at their most ragged and disjunctive, remain rhythmically knit and crafted, while the occasional sonnet, villanelle, or ghazal retains something of the ease and authenticity of speech.
About the author
John Slater grew up in Unionville, Ontario, and was attracted to poetry at a young age. After three years of literature and philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, he left school to pursue life as a Cistercian monk, a vocation in which he’s continued happily since January of 2000. Immersion in the rhythm of monastic living, its definite structures and open spaces, were formative in the genesis of Surpassing Pleasure. Slater’s responsibilities include caring for elderly monks and tending a Japanese garden. His poems and translations have appeared in Canadian Literature, Queen’s Quarterly and PN Review. His work, The Tangled Braid: Ninety-Nine Poems by Hafiz of Shiraz, co-translated with Jeffrey Einboden, appeared in the Spring of 2010 from Fons Vitae. Currently he is at work on a degree in theology from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and is particularly interested in the literary/rhetorical features of the work of Bernard of Clairvaux, a major writer in the Cistercian tradition. After the silence of the cloister, life in Washington (‘like living in a spy-novel’) reminds him often of the saying of Anthony of the Desert: ‘A monk outside his monastery is like a fish out of water.’ Fortunately, Slater finds, he is somewhat amphibious.
