Keep the Feast: Poems

Stephen Cushman’s Keep the Feast sings in the tradition of the psalmists and devotional poets, offering an intimate, ecstatic doxology, both exultant and indicting, spiritual and secular. His poems make prodigious and intrepid forays into the realms of history, sexuality, religious ardor, the imperiled planet, and the reasons for making art. At the heart of this three-part book lies the title poem, which takes as a formal model Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the Bible. In luminous verse, Cushman’s speaker rejoices in the commitments of faith, finding in them a way of living with the paradoxes of twenty-first-century life and of holding belief in an often-unfathomable world.

Stephen Cushman is a poet and a scholar of American literature and the Civil War. His recent books include Hothead: A Poem and The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today. He is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.