So many people are turning to faith since September 11, looking for reassurance, trying to find answers to hard questions. This remarkable book skips the banal platitudes; instead, it gave me real, solid guidance to begin to face those hard questions and try to make sense of it all. The variety and depth of this astounding collection of essays is breathtaking. I was astonished by how many different faiths are represented. Especially moving, to me, was a New York parish priest's account of ministering to victims. We also get to eavesdrop on the Beliefnet community as they helped each other cope in the days following the attacks; the personal interactions are riveting. Only Beliefnet could have created this book. This is a gift that truly will help us all rise "from the ashes."

I stumbled across beliefnet.com a few days after September 11 and found it to be full of much of the best and most insightful writing to be found anywhere. This book, which compiles many of the articles Beliefnet has published on the tragedy, demonstrates that the spiritual issues raised in the articles Ñ justice, evil, retaliation, even the very existence of God Ñ are not just timely. They are issues we are going to have to deal with over and over again. And this book is loaded with wisdom for anyone who is attempting to deal honestly with those issues.

The authors range from traditionalist Christians to Bishop John Shelby Spong, who argues that after September 11, we have to picture God in a different way than we ever have before. The ideas range from strong supporters of military response to the Dalai Lama and Bishop Tutu who counsel forgiveness. One of the most interesting pieces, for me, was Karen Armstrong's essay on Islam, comparing its attitude toward violence to that of Judaism and Christianity. There has been so much nonsense published on that subject over the past month. It was wonderful to read the insights of someone who understands and respects all three faiths.

The best thing about this book is that despite the range of opinions (which guarantees that every reader is going to find many ideas they disagree with), I did not find a single essay to be without merit. Even the ones I disagreed with all said things I felt I had to think about. There is no political or spiritual posturing here, but, in every case, an open and honest discussion of issues.

This is a beautifully written and important book for anyone who cares about spiritual issues.

Picked this book up at an airport just before
my flight and was unable to put it down during
the entire flight! It is filled with healing
words, inspirational thoughts, and wisdom from
some of the greatest spiritual leaders of our
times, at a time when so many are desperately
seeking answers to questions regarding this
horrific tragedy against mankind. I strongly
recommend this book --- a must read for all of
us who care deeply about what happened to our
nation on September 11.

This book used to be extremely hard to find, so it's nice to see this edition and know that it's been reprinted since i read it in '82.

Here's what makes this book so interesting: Douglas was a student of literature, British, so his perspective on being a tanker in WWII reflects an insightful sensibility. He fought in numerous campaigns in Africa (Alamein and on) before dying in Normandy shortly after being called back to active duty. Douglas is considered one of the finest war poets of WWII, but it's his descriptions of tank battles and the hot, concussive nature of it that is most memorable to me.

This is the kind of war memoir that is often overlooked but rare in it's depth and scope.

Keith Douglas wrote a poetry boasting an incantatory and muscular lyricism that few others of his generation matched. He could carry off sentimental themes effectively because he used language that never blinked or swooned. Yet his tough,verbal carapaces sheltered a heart that bled to see "how easy it is to make a ghost". He was just beginning to find his own voice when he was killed in 1944. What were his influences? His poetry contain traces of T S Eliot's whimsical modernist tone in "The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock": "Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake/a pasty Syrian with a few words of English/or the Turk who says she is a princess" ("Cairo Jag".) Or Douglas recalled William Blake and his conversational apocalypticism, when "he looks at the sea/and does not smell its animal smell/Does not suspect the heaven or hell/in the mind of a passerby" ("Egytpian sentry). Or even WH Auden's opinionated rhythms: "I praise a snakeskin or a stone: a bald head or a public speech I hate" ("Snakeskin and Stone". Occasionally, Douglas conjured Matthew Arnold of "Dover Beach" fame, where "Everywhere is a real of artificial race/of life, a struggle of everyone to be/master or mistress of some hour." ("Egyptian sentry"). But perhaps his most characteristic influence was John Donne and the conceits of the Metaphysical poets: "Can I explain this to you? Your eyes/are entrances the mouths of caves - I issue from wonderful interiors/upon a blessed sea and a fine day/from inside these caves I look and dream". The telegrammatic sharpness and urgency of his language remained taut throughout his short writing life. Even as a precocious fourteen year old, he wrote with a disciplined terseness: "The small men walk about antlike/and the bell tolls. God created these/beautiful and angular, not different", when many others of his age might be experimenting with the verbal luxuriance of Keats or liquid verbosity of Shakespeare. However, the key to the poetry of this very unEnglish poet, who was more Latin with his impulsive temperament, is contained in several loving translations of Arthur Rimbaud, which gives us a clue as to how the twentysomething tank commander perceived himself and his poetry. Translating Rimbaud, a tortured young French symbolist poet who gave up writing at 20, Douglas premonitions his own death from shellfire shrapnel in "Le Dormeur du Val", where "A young soldier with bare head and mouth open/and his neck immersed in the fresh blue flowers/is sleeping stretched out in grass under heaven/pale in his green bed where the light showers". The sentimentalisation of a hero's death and the Romantic liebestode is at odds with his saner observation elsewhere: "How can I live among this gentle/obsolsecent breed of heroes, and not weep?" (Aristocrats), suggesting a fundamental tension in his personality and work, between cool sobriety and dramatic passion, which remained unresolved, perhaps because he failed to find personal reconcilation in what he called the "rose of love" ("I experiment"). Ultimately, Douglas demands not to be judged by his immature outbursts, or sentimental dreaminess, but by his tough yet humane response to what "the others never set eyes on". He implores us in "Tel Aviv": "Do not laugh because I have made a poem;/it is to use what then we could not handle/words too dangerous then, knowing their explosive/or incendiary tendencies when we are so close-/if i had said this to you then, BANG will/have gone our walls of indifference in flame."

Keith Douglas was the greatest English poet of the Second World War, which admittedly isn't saying a hell of a lot, as there were few others who even came close. It was that kind of war. But Douglas was already precociously talented when he joined a cavalry regiment (the Sherwood Yeomanry) and wangled himself a post commanding a light tank in the Western Desert.

The war made Douglas as a poet, and also killed him. He seems always to have had a premonition of early death; one of his most haunting poems is the much-anthologised "Simplify Me When I'm Dead". The title makes the point. He survived some bitter fighting in Africa, and was killed, bizarrely enough, by a mortar shell in Normandy, which left no trace on his body.

Douglas' best poems, which frankly number around half a dozen, introduce a new note into English poetry that wouldn't be picked up until Sylvia Plath had a crack at it more than fifteen years later. His mature tone is almost but not quite conversational, laconic, hardly bothering to rhyme, and yet eerily compressed and kaleidoscopic. His is truly a poetry that strings a tightrope above an abyss. Poems like "Adams", the aforementioned "Simplify Me When I'm Dead", "How To Kill" and the persistently unfinishable "Bete Noire" pack a charge that very few poets since have matched. His last poem, "On A Return From Egypt", seems to be a genuine premonition of his own death.

While Douglas only barely managed to write enough really good poems to be considered a major poet - which he is - it's hard not to think that, on the one hand, it's a tragedy that he didn't live longer and write more, and on the other hand that his entire work seems almost to have been planned to culminate in his death (he died at 24, a lot younger than Rimbaud.)

Douglas at his worst is mannered and romantic, but his best work is the flipside of that - terse, no-nonsense, energetic and deeply worrying. He is missed, even if the curve of his development makes future work almost inconceivable.

His poetry exhibits a muscular lyricism. (If you want to understand where Douglas is coming from,you can do better than to read my review. Ted Hughes has written a considered introduction to the selected poems of this WWII poet.)

Two poems stand out in Douglas' ouevre. "How to Kill" and "Vergissemeinicht" The first is a taut meditation on the act of killing, from the point of view of a sniper viewing a soldier in his "dial of glass...who is going to die" and "moves about in ways his mother knows". The form of the poem is unusual with an 'imploding ' abccba rhyming scheme. "Vergissemeinicht" is German for Forget-me-not. The poem takes its title from a message found scrawled on a girl's photo in a dead German tankman's Panzer, that "is good and hard, when he is decayed." Don't think Douglas is all war poetry or pure pacifist gore. He just happened to write his best stuff during the war, including a semi-biographical novel before he was killed in 1944 aged 24. A gifted prodigy with a forceful temperament, some of his love poems from his Oxford days, display a tenderness and sensitivity that veers into dramatic exclamations, conveying the rich, complex character of the poet. His remarkable gift for evocative language and his obsessive personality is captured in lines written while training in Egypt: "I listen to the desert wind, that will not blow her from my mind". There are times when Douglas' emotional immaturity mars what is otherwise a significant achievement for someone so young. He lapses occasionally into self-indulgent verse that inhibits his essential big-heartedness for both love and life. In Douglas' poetry, love and life are in fact used interchangeably. This is perhaps fitting for a poet at war, who did not permit his intellect or sensibility to be brutalised by the encompassing violence. As a tankman, Douglas' war was itself hermetically sealed in a way, until he was caught by a sliver of shrapnel so fine, no! wound was apparent. Characteristically, that final moment was prophetically recorded in one of his last poems which is included in this collection.