Iconography: A Writer's Meditation

This is a brilliant book, a must-read for any serious writer, whether her or she is a poet, memoirist, or fiction writer. Susan Neville writes beautiful lyric meditations on par with great contemporary poet-essayists Robert Hass, Mary Oliver and Marianne Boruch. This book is as important to any writer / artist / thinker as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Richard Hugo's Triggering Town.

Fans of Susan Neville's stunning work will find Iconography another sustained meditation on meditation itself. As in her Fabrication where visits to Indiana factories act as conduits to the sublime, Neville here utilizes a nifty frame--that of a two year effort to paint an orthodox icon--to trigger her always surprising, nuanced, strongly felt ruminations on mundane and holy spheres. Neville is a wonder and wonderful. Her work is deeply layered, lacquered, burnished, gold edged, patinaed. This book is a gift, a gift from a sacred and very human space. It arrives as the original holy icons did--out of the clouds, upon the waves--direct from the hand of God.