Psalms for Skeptics

“Kent Gramm’s Psalms for Skeptics is a lively, agile response to the traditional book of psalms, a response that opposes the psalmist’s belief in a divine order to his own earthbound perspective. Irreverent and subversive, they nevertheless regard the views they question as imposing enough to deserve a passionate reply. Too witty and wide-ranging to be strident, the poems move from personal experience into politics and cosmology. They truly rise to the occasion.”

Carl Dennis

Sparked by phrases from the Book of Psalms, these poems question and occasionally affirm our everyday ideas about life, mortality, the afterlife, God, family, and belief. In vigorous contemporary language but in traditional form, these poems complain, lament, and wisecrack on Job’s wife, baseball, crows, circus elephants, Mary Magdalene, and the strangeness of life.

Then the whirlwind came and Job was answered — with questions, naturally; rhetorical in nature, and very pointed. Thus all his puzzles were solved — or so we have heard. Of course none of this ever really happened: it’s literature, the Book of Job, no more. Nevertheless, don’t you kind of wonder whether the Jobs moved to Los Angeles, and whether he was answered — or enlightened? Because as he stood there in the whirlwind, his robes blowing and sand stinging his face, how could Job do anything but look down or hear any supernatural sound until the dust fell, and the Ghost rose away?

Psalms for Skeptics

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