Mercy Wears a Red Dress

The work of a wonderful secular poet, Billy Collins, provides a great model for Christian writers. His Coleridge ""conversation poems"" allow for real play and comedy, all in the service of profundity. These are veins that have not been suitably mined by poets who have access to the larger humanity that only Jesus can provide. But there's more than comedy in this collection. The Sorrows of Mary offer a sober truth, as do the four Gospel sonnets; both sections provide a bracing interlude before we get back to high-spirited comedy in the St. Anthony poems--where the sainted speaker disdains direction and instead carries on about whatever is on his mind at the moment. In all, Mercy Wears a Red Dress offers a slice of the abundant life, a knowledge echoed in a Protestant hymn: ""I read the back of the book and we win."" ""In poem after poem, Craig helps us see his and our foolishness; still, the self-deprecating voice here is also the voice of wonder: how mysteriously and gracefully we get through our lives even when we are 'still everything we aren't.' Craig can be devilishly funny, heartbreaking, and profoundly searching as he examines all those human failures and frailties that make us all one another."" --Robert Cording, author of Only So Far ""In the past, Craig's poems have taken us through Midwestern bus stations, Browns' games, cab driving in Denver. These new ones explore God's challenge to live out our vocation in the domestic church. Mercy Wears a Red Dress brings a fresh, frank, and familiar voice to the life of Christian pilgrimage that makes it his most appealing and accomplished work to date. These are poems that help us see who we really are."" --James Matthew Wilson, author of The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking David Craig, who's been called the best Christian poet writing today, teaches at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. This is his 22nd collection.