The Audition digs deep: its fresh, heartfelt poems enchant, challenge, and uplift while conveying our yearning for connection and reconciliation. They explore, in three parts, Longing, Limbo, and Restoration. The poetry's driving, musical quality has an evocative urgency and is immersive with a touch of the absurd. Hopeful in tone, The Audition takes us on a journey and, with the concluding poem, "Unrestored," we have both arrived and are on the way to a higher place. Influences that can be felt include poets Guillaume Apollinaire for his melodic patterns and Emily Dickinson for her elevation of the quotidian, as well as lay theologian William Stringfellow's reckoning with alienation. Moses Maimonides, Dante, and Gaspara Stampa get mentions, as do John Milton, Christina Rossetti, and Aldous Huxley. "The Bridge Hears" recalls Paris, and "The Handshake" pays tribute to the poet's meeting Queen Elizabeth II, while "Rupture" is a homage to Black Elk at Wounded Knee.
Industry Reviews
“These poems give voice to the human condition. They yearn, confess, explore, and praise, opening up our lives to a longing for what is, paradoxically, already given. As such they help us to see ourselves and our lives anew, as places of encounter and revelation with the God who is ‘eternally overturning’ our preconceptions.”
—Anna Matthews, vicar, St Bene’t’s Church
“Nancy Coombs’ poems threaten constantly to leap off the page as prayer or song, each one leaning deep into the primordial sensations of rhyme, repetition, and invocation, each verse an effort to enunciate the sacred lost words able to reveal the mysteries of the human and the spirit. The Audition is exactly what it names, a trying out of possibilities spiritual and deep, a remembering of pasts and a conjuring of futures. It is not to be missed.”
—Philip J. Deloria, professor of history, Harvard University
“The Audition is a collection of poems that explore the human condition and all that it entails. You cannot read these works without feeling what it means to be human. I found myself experiencing emotions, thoughts, and struggles that I had hidden away long ago. Each piece pulls you in. By the end you experience the full spectrum of what it means to be alive. Well done!”
—Curtis Jordan, writer and executive producer of Playing Through
“The Audition is a searching and deeply literary exploration of contemporary spirituality that is not afraid to ask questions or express a sense of loss and perplexity that is surely integral to an experience of the divine in our time. What especially recommends this collection of poems is the way they illuminate life lived as a continuing dialogue with many of the most powerful texts from our spiritual tradition.”
—Neil Robertson, professor of humanities, University of King’s College
