What Holiness Will I Bring?
by Richard Osler
Poet, healer, artist, Richard Osler contemplates the question: “What Holiness Will I Bring?” After receiving a stage four cancer diagnosis and deciding not to pursue treatment, Osler accesses what he authentically teaches through his work as a poetry therapist. He knows, poetry heals. In this luminous collection, he reflects on how artists speak a divine language of image and colour, he gives tribute to many beloved and how they gleam in fleeting images, and he responds to art, artist, and prayer as they lead to “God’s-held sky.” His answer to the title question is a book of sublime worship.
This book is scheduled for public release in November, but is available now for pre-order. Books pre-ordered will ship as soon as we receive copies from the printer.
$19.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .208 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 9 × 6 × 0.2642 in |
| Page Count | 80 |
| Binding | Soft Cover with flaps |
| Year Published | 2024 |
Richard Osler
Richard Osler is part of the vibrant poetry community on Southern Vancouver Island. After a career as a journalist, CBC Morningside national business columnist and money manager, Quadra Books published his first full length poetry collection, Hyaena Season, in 2016. He has led writer’s poetry workshops in Italy, the U.S. and Canada. And he has been active as a poetry therapist in the addictions recovery community on the Island since 2009.
“I say to the world / be my open mouth,” writes Richard Osler. A soulful poet, he teaches us how, despite everything, to stay endlessly in love with the world. “When I trust words / they become / skilled informers,” he says, “my own face now wise with the news / of death inside of me,” he says, speaking to us from the condition of fourth stage cancer, but still insisting on revealing to us this “art of knowing / and being known.” This insistence is generosity. What do we learn? We learn to live passionately, intently, with a fire of clarifying search. We learn poetry is a spiritual discipline, the kind in which the world is our friend. The world is sayable. The soul exists. The search is ongoing. And music lives in the hands.
~ Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
This stunning collection of poems – “these intimate prayers” – compiled after Richard Osler’s Stage 4 Cancer diagnosis, are charged with sorrow, but there is also a joy in the fragile mystery of this world. “I am a mirage caught between life / and death, a mirabelle no less marvelous”, Osler writes. The poems are eloquent, haunting, and beautifully attuned to a light that shines in the ultimate darkness. The face of death that Osler presents through these tender, vulnerable poems is one of somber grace. It takes a lifetime to write poems that so exquisitely braid life and death into a majestic whole. The courage and unerring compass of Osler’s words is a gift to us all.
~ Rosemary Griebel, author of Yes.
These are poems that embrace the world: poems of depth and grace, evoking life’s transience and death’s inevitability, but also life’s gifts: of artistic creation, of love, of connection with the divine. What Holiness Will I Bring? The answer is: these poems themselves.
~ Peggy Rosenthal, author of Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times