A Far Country Here - Paperback

by George Hobson (Author), John Paris (Foreword by)

The six sections of this collection are like a sequence of musical variations on the theme of personal identity as it develops from childhood to death. The first section evokes the poet's experience of being lost, of his search for identity, and of his being found by God. Section II, in a kind of echo of Section I, celebrates the successive seasons of nature and functions as a metaphor for the movement through a life. Section III is a boisterous fugue on the high drama of clouds in the course of a day, from dawn to nightfall. Section IV, in a series of portraits of persons (and of a cat!), some dead, some living, intimates the mystery of friendship, love, and loss. Section V contains narratives, drawn from history and nature, that extend this mystery to the link human beings intuitively sense between this world and a "world elsewhere." In the final section, the poet's personal experience resurfaces as he contemplates, with wonder and gratitude, his course through the years from childhood to old age, even through death itself to the "far country" he has sensed and longed for all his life.

Author Biography

George Hobson has published six volumes of poetry: Rumours of Hope (2005); Faces of Memory (2017); Love Poems for My Wife Victoria (2019); The Parthenon (2A019); May Day Morning in Yerevan (2020); and Heights and Depths (2021). A retired Episcopal priest who has lived over half his life in France working for ecumenical renewal, he has taught theology in many developing countries, including Rwanda, Burundi, Haiti, Armenia, and Pakistan.