I Have Desired To Go

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poetry so radical that most of it sat unpublished during his lifetime, dismissed by contemporaries as too strange, too intense, too innovations. This collection gathers the works that would eventually revolutionize English poetry: poems that hear the 'grandeur' of God in a coal mine and the 'blue-bleak embers' of a winter sky, that watch a kestrel 'roll' through morning air, that wrestling with despair and beauty in the same gasping breath. Hopkins invented sprung rhythm, a prosody that mimics the natural pulse of spoken English, and bent language itself until it sang in unfamiliar ways. These are poems of the physical world made simultaneously sacred and wounded, where a dead farrier's name becomes a bell, where spring brings thoughts of death, where the poet argues with God in the dark and calls it 'carrion comfort.' For readers who want poetry that hits the body as much as the mind, that refuses to be quiet or comfortable, this is the urgent, blazing heart of Victorian verse.