The Desert is one of the best anthologies of mediations for Lent that I have seen. The book has three explanatory chapters on desert spirituality and it's literature. The core of the book is a group of readings for each day of lent, the group rarely filling two pages.

The breadth of material selected is impressive. The fourth Wednesday of Lent, to pick any example, has writings of Charles de Foucauld, the desert father Abbot Moses, Alessandro Pronzato, and Thomas Merton. Many of the readings are merely a sentence. From the same example, one quote from Charles de Foucauld: "Love consists not in feeling that you love, but in the will to love."

The Desert This anthology infused my Lenten season with holiness and a step towards a deeper contemplation in the Mystery. Short daily readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day are broken down into themes of The Call to the Desert, Solitude, Testing, Self-Emptying, Encounter, Transfiguration and the Divine Mystery.

The words accompanied me as I shared the forty day journey with Christ. I found some of the readings especially helpful in preparing for reconciliation with God.

This is a book I plan to reread again next Lent. The readings have eternal significance and infinite insights.

The problem with Indermark's Genesis of Grace is that it ends. I wanted his insights and daily readings to continue beyond Easter. Here it is fifty days later and I still miss the book. I hope the author will publish other materials.

Indermark's writing combines biblical stories (readings each day in Genesis) with a commentary that ranges from biblical practice to a very contemporary visit to Auschwitz. This is a good daily devotional book.

Daily readings in the book of Genesis are a bit of a surprise for the season of Lent, but I found this book to be an exception aid during Lent of '98. Indermark focuses on the spiritual journey and makes some surprising connections with contemporary concerns.

I liked how "Neglected Voices" was written with the author focusing on one biblical character for 2 consecutive days of readings. I felt that I got to know a little more about what each character did in the Bible.

This book offers intelligent daily meditations that deal with some of the most unknown and unusual characters in the Bible. Before reading Indermark's book, I had no idea who Shiphrah and Puah were, though they figure very strongly in the story leading up to the Exodus. And Indermark exegetes these two characters in such a way that they connect very well with contemporary life. Most other characters are equally unknown and yet, the author connects them with our spiritual pilgrimages. I would like to use this excellent book as the basis for a small group gathering.

Themes And Issues In Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, And Sexy employs overviews and case studies by noted scholars in an informative and insightful discussion of Asian animation, humor magazines, gag cartoons, comic strips, and comic books. A seminal and benchmark contribution to the subject, Themes And Issues In Asian Cartooning is essential reading for students of Asian popular culture and of intense interest for comics fandom from anima movies to manga comics.

The poet shows incredible "versatility and poise" in his examination of consciousness against the backdrop of the Central and North Okanagan's exquisite scenery.

Eliot-like in its interiority (bad pun), the poem has a narrative drive (another pun) akin to Wayman's poetry.

One of the few poets of substance in BC.

John Lent's "Monet's Garden" provides its readers with a unique opportunity. This is a chance for an intimate look at a family, and their growth into adulthood. Lent deals with the struggles of a Canadian family, approaching topics such as alcoholism and grief with incredible tenderness and insight. While the writing is simple, a deeper meaning is felt in each part of this short-story collection. There is also a sense of familiarity, as Lent builds his characters with impressive intimacy. Our trip through the lives of each of these characters allows us the opportunity to compare the ways in which they deal with essentially the same problems. The theme of reflection and self-discovery becomes increasingly apparent as the novel progresses, and allows for even more insight into each character's thoughts and actions. "Monet's Garden" employs a completely different approach to the usual methods of character and scene development, and this provides for a refreshing read.

John Lent's linked story sequence, Monet's Garden, offers a complex and sensitive evocation of being. This is Lent's fifth book, his second of fiction. The writer shows a greater control of his image clusters, retaining his fine poetic sensibility from earlier volumes: A Rock Solid (1978), Wood Lake Music (1982), Frieze (1984), The Face in the Garden (1990). Lent's postmodern structure dramatizes an ongoing disintegration and recuperation of self in the unnamed narrator, whose "Roof" sequence intersperses the story of other characters, Rick, Jane, Neil, and Charles Connolly.

In the "Roof" sequence we have a narrator that creates Rick, Jane, Neil, and Charles as disparate parts of him/her self: "The voices that began in the car three months ago have stopped. They've spun themselves out, all these parts of me. A small jazz suite moves into its closing chords, picking up the disparate threads...". In the ellipsis a suggestion of (re) fragmentation and further improvisation occurs. The opening story, "As Far as He Could See", precedes the first of the "Roof" sequence to emphasize previous improvisation, outside of the closed, circular structure: the book is open at both ends.

This is the most pertinent theme, one addressed in the narratives driven by Jane, Rick, Neil and the narrator. A freshness in 'life' for the characters, whose narratives grow forth from the narrator's metafictional concerns in "Roof": "Sometimes we use metaphors because they carry us--like the hand, hose, water, cement and grass--farther into what happened rather than away from it." This meditation is expanded in Rick's narrative, "Room": "The smell of cool water on the stones and the gold of the sun dancing into it made Rick feel exhilarated, at home." And, in Jane's narrative, the title story, "Monet's Garden": "A shopkeeper...was hosing down the sidewalk in front of his shop, and the water there shone like silver across the flat black asphalt of the streets." The point is to the shades of language that we can deploy in relation to the commonplace, to evoke a sensory apprehension of being. Take joy in life, the writer asserts.

All of the characters are thoughtful, the point, is to go past the mind's defences (control, irony, ritual are a few Lent uses), to reach a greater openness to being. This is why Monet, impressionism, and Strasbourg are important, particularly in the evocative "Taste": "At first they'd been disarmed by how physical the people in Strasbourg were. Rick and Jennifer were Canadians, after all, and had grown up in their heads." "They loved the communal street feeling of it compared to the closed houses and televisions back home." These might be a cliché, but the retention and transporting of what they learn into the narrator's sequence "Roofs in the Morning" ("collective", "physical texture of the lives") into that other life and culture.

The narrator is "reaching for metaphors". For example, in the story titled "The Bright Field", Charles, the siblings' father, is dead, but his thoughts intersperse the rest of the family's discussion (a structural cue to the text as a whole is given). Charles' thoughts offer his epiphany on life in a poignant existential moment: the ability to encompass the familiar and the mysterious, to see their beauty and growth, and to surrender control: being, if only for a moment. The pungent echo of her father's gift in the North Dakota cornfield ("The Bright Field") leads to Jane's appreciation of a Frenchman's gift ("Monet's Garden"), which, banal as it seems, allows her to see a landscape "of this world" and thus surrender "into the world". Similarly, Rick surrenders to the lived, experiential life ("Taste") and Neil aims for a middle ground between complete sublimation to and complete control over being ("Think of the People Behind You").

Finally, Lent's book is about the ways we order, engage, ritualize, and surrender to the space of being. In its figurative language and improvisational apprehension of lives, Monet's Garden has an appeal to artists, writers, musicians and especially to the general reading public because of its stress on the joys and freshness to be found in day-to-day existence.

In Monet's Garden, John Lent successfully grabs the reader's attention. Throughout Monet's Garden each character deals with chaos and order in his/her life. Most of the characters fear chaos and in the end each character realizes that chaos and order, are both a part of life. Sometimes you just have to enter the "thick" and deal with things as they come. You realize it is very important in life to stop and think in order to advance. The family in the book is very large at the begining, but Lent combines all the children into three metaphorical children at the end of "Roofs" (Rick, Jane and Neil). Each metaphorical child is the narrator for at least one chapter in the book. Lent also uses many similes and metaphors that bring the reader closer to the novel. A main metaphor throughout the novel is the use of dark and light. Lent uses this metaphor to express chaos(dark) and perfection(light) throughout the novel. We are able to see the many challenges in life that other people have to go through. Sometimes these challenges can be to much and Lent shows this by using three metaphorical children. This book is very deep and I think it would move any soul that took the time to read it.

Useful introductory material, and thorough guide to European animation, caricature, comic books, comic strips, and political cartoons.

Useful introduction relating to the history of the subject. Comphrehensive guide to comic books, comic strips, and their creators.

John Lent's mixture of prose and poetry in The Face in the Garden marks his transition from an accomplished and demanding poet (Frieze/Wood Lake Music)to a writer of literary fiction. The hybrid form works well, distilling consciousness and more closely approximating subjectivity in the poetry; while, the prose effortlessly drives forth the external narrative with considerable wit. Lent's more recent "Monet's Garden" (Thistledown, 1996) builds off the lessons learned in this transitional volume.

I am afraid that I must agree with this book's other reviewer. I, too, was delighted to see this title, and chose it to be my daily meditation reading for Lent. After only three days, however, I am determined to exchange it at the church bookstore for a title that is more fitting the solemnity and introspection of the season.

It is simply mond-boggling that someone, particularly an Anglican scholar or priest, feels called to edit Donne in the way. One of the glories of the Anglican tradition is an acute sensitivity to ritual, language, and the spiritual life of the intellectual, and unfortunately, this book seems to respect none of these. It's such a disappointment. Who better to read on the 40 days of Lent than John Donne? I will still do so, but on my own, in the original, glorious language.

When I spotted this title, I was delighted. The idea seemed excellent, nay, inspired. Upon receiving and reviewing it, however, I was dismayed to find that, while the excerpts have been judiciously selected, they have also been subjected to an editorial process which deprives Donne of much of his rhetorical force. For instance, Donne's quotations from the Bible are replaced with those of a modern translation, both his language and syntax are modified to conform to modern American practice, and his prose further altered to reflect gender inclusivity. Is it really necessary to change every "thee" to a "you" in order to make these writings accessible? Isn't it hubris in the highest degree to re-write the "Holy Sonnets" or the "Hymn to God the Father"? This edition may be fine for those who like their Donne strained to the consistency of baby food. Others should be forewarned that this isn't Donne, but Donne as translated into contemporary Anglican liturgy-speak. Deeply disappointing.