Dimestore Saints: Sonnets from the Gosepl of St. Matthew
by David Craig
- Product Code: dss
- Publication date: March 24, 2025
- Pages: 182
- Size: 5.5 x 8.5
$19.95
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My adult daughter, who still hasn’t gotten confirmed, recently delivered some incisive car commentary on Catholic male radio voices. “They sound like pleasant eunuchs; not alive, self-consciously holy.”
As I sit here, I’m reminded of T group facilitators back in my undergrad days: gentle healers, seeped in their own goodness. The artificial smiles, the invite to come and join THAT party!
Well, we’re all sinners.
And that’s the point I want to make in these sonnets. We all reach for Jesus, and we all fall short—and so often! (People have to clean up behind us.) These sonnets try to move along that fault line. They reach for the King, but attempt to do so spaciously, to accommodate the human.
Then why the beauty of the sonnet form?
There is an arc of glory behind every move the Christian thinks he is making by himself: Jesus is the air we breathe. Being itself, He accounts for each hand before we lift it.
He moves the air currents so we can walk on the right path. He allows us to participate.
There’s an extravagance in His (our) every move. He accounts for every sin, will turn each; that is part of the alleluia of heaven.
We will truly be ourselves there. Maybe we’ll still have our quirks, our little eccentricities.
Others will rejoice in them. Maybe St. Francis will come looking for you! -
“These are really splendid examples of the sonnet form with its difficulty, its logic, its power, its capacity to surprise. . . . The poems made me see the scriptures in a different way; as Christ did on the way to Emmaus, he opened them up for me.” —Ron Hansen, deacon, author of The Kid, Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus
“Taken singly, each poem is wonderfully crafted and deeply wise. Taken together, they stand as an achievement that is nothing less than monumental. They confirm what I have long suspected, that David Craig is among the finest religious poets writing today.” —William Bedford Clark, editor, The Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren
“What an impressive collection this is. For the past two days I have been reading with the Gospel of Matthew open beside me, and I feel as if I have been on an intensive retreat. . . . I truly believe this is a masterpiece.” —Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, author of From Shade to Shine and What Cannot Be Fixed
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