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Mark, Joan of Arc, and Eusebio Kino, the Arizona missionary. Faith is illustrated in poems on Boethius, St. Rather, it offers encouragement by calling on the traditional theological virtues. “While City under Siege depicts the false gods and deep flaws of contemporary hedonistic culture, the collection is not despairing. While many poets today confine their subject matter within the bounds of what is taken for most common or familiar in our time, Amorose has found a way to build up an entire poetic out of our Faith and devotion.”Īssociate Professor of Religion and Literature, Villanova University “Mark Amorose’s poetry comes out of the New Formalist tradition, and indeed offers a fine example of it. Time and again I was impressed by his embrace of poetic form to guide his grammar, rhythm, and logic to realize what is at once a classical plain style and an assured religious sensibility. Christians of every denomination should read this book and pass it on to friends and neighbors, to be further inspired by the author’s art.” Like the passionate Gerard Manley Hopkins, Amorose also writes poems with richly rhyming verse, a love of nature, and the wisdom of the gospels. In his book’s title, City under Siege, Amorose hints that America’s culture is collapsing and its faith failing, while poetry saves our social and spiritual challenges with the help of God. “Mark Amorose, a master of the sonnet and epigram, is a rare poet, one who overcomes poetry’s most difficult challenge: religious poems. Poet-in-Residence Emeritus, Nicholls State University And it is an heroic defense of the City of God, a city now under siege, yet against which, in the end, no force can ever prevail.” City under Siege is contemporary Catholic poetry at its finest.
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Amorose praises creation, the Catholic Church, Mary, angels, saints, and martyrs-his sonnet on English martyr Robert Southwell is magnificent and he condemns reductive scientism, soulless commercialism, self-serving relativism, and widespread violations of the Church’s teachings on sexuality. In poem after poem of elegant formality (Amorose is a master of the Italian sonnet), the reader is taken on a journey from the pre-Christian world through biblical times, on to the high noon of medieval Christendom, and finally, through a flawed Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism, to the spiritual wastelands of modernity. “In City under Siege, poet Mark Amorose ranges widely across Western history.