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Weak Devotions: poems
In Weak Devotions, his first poetry collection, Luke Hankins engages with great honesty the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in the spiritual life. Far from seeking mere "self-expression," Hankins has honed these explorations into tightly knit meditations and monologues that will resonate with the deepest questions and longings of readers of all backgrounds.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 2, 2011
16 people want to read
About the author
Luke Hankins
21 books10 followersLuke Hankins is the author of two poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. He is also the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was released by Seagull Books in 2019. Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 5, 2017
It's not a new book any longer, but I'm interested in poetry addressed to the God-shaped hole in the human psyche, and I'd seen one of its poems online, so I ordered it. I was not disappointed. This mix of free and loosely formal verse is skillful, moving, and thought provoking. I especially enjoyed the final section, "The Voice of One Crying Out."
July 10, 2012
A fine collection of poems, particularly the third and fourth sections, with powerful devotional poems in section III, and honest, thought-provoking prayers of various artists and believers. A collection that struggles with death, the juxtaposition of tragedy and beauty, God's place in and around the life of a bruised believer.
February 2, 2022
This collection vibrates with a constant search for God. The poet is strongly rooted into nature, into the earthly world; into his childhood and origins. He is intimate to each element of the ecosystem but his attachment makes sense only because of the divine. Hankins conflictual relation to a Supreme Being, seems to bear with it the key to unlock the name of every single creature and to name the poetry itself. The poet's faith recalls to one's mind the faith of the proto-humanist Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, the poet of subjectivity who opened the poetic art to modernity with his doubts and his inability to repent. His faith flickered between the love for mundane glory, Laura, and the love for God. Hankins, just like Petrarca did with the work “Secretum (De secreto conflictu curarum mearum - the private conflict of my thoughts),” turns his mind to Saint Augustine with the exergue to “Hedonist’s Prayer”: “I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay” (Augustine, Confessions,Book II, 4.9). But it seems that Augustine is palpable everywhere in "Weak Devotions". In “Dancers’ Prayer”, the last stanza recalls Augustine’s poem "In Praise of Dancing" .
“ [...] God, / when we cease to merely hope/ to be,/ when we become, oh God-Of-That-Success,/and cease to be mere witnesses,/ when the lights ignite, adrenaline / sets the heart alight, muscles / awake, and we abandon / ideas/ and every conception of beauty/ in order to participate,/ to no longer see, but to be/ part/of it.
(L. Hankins, Dancer’s Prayer)
“I praise the dance, for it frees people
from the heaviness of matter
and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain,
will, or feeling.”
(Saint Augustine, In Praise of Dancing)
Both the poems invite the idea of community, of being part of. Augustine's influence can be seen also elsewhere. In the poem no. V, of the third section titled “Weak Devotion”
“Our holiest act is to enter into mystery,
just as God's holiest act was to enter
into mortal flesh,into death --
the only mystery available to Him.”
the influence of the saint and philosopher from Hippo is patent:
“Without God, man cannot. Without man, God will not.”
-St. Augustine
Contradiction and uncertainty in experiencing faith, turns out to be essential to Hankins' inspiration. Emblematic of the pivotal role played by God in the poet's work , is
"Portrait of Myself as a Barbarian". The *barbarous century*, is evocative of how nature would lose meaning not only in a pre-scientific age ("long before before the invention of eyeglasses") but in a godless age; although God is not mentioned the image of the poet who stumbles "from the fireside" (...) "heading for my hut/but in the wrong direction" sounds allusive to a loss caused by the absence of God. It is like groping in the dark. Totally antithetic to the "woods full / of phantom impediments--" in this poem, stands the woods where the poet is drawn through by the antlers of a deer, in "Elusive Animal, Carry Me". It is remarkable that one of the strongest symbol of North American literature, the deer, precisely of the so called "bildunsgroman" (narrative of initiation), rather than being the victim of a neophyte who will pass from the status of a child to the status of adulthood, becomes a sort of sacred guide that brings the neophyte to safety.
An incarnation of God? A desire to be guided by Him to cross the tangled woods? Perhaps. The fact is that Luke Hankins has a lot in common with those poets who, from the ancient world, foreran modernity. He expresses through poetry the need for archetypes by re-establishing them.
“ [...] God, / when we cease to merely hope/ to be,/ when we become, oh God-Of-That-Success,/and cease to be mere witnesses,/ when the lights ignite, adrenaline / sets the heart alight, muscles / awake, and we abandon / ideas/ and every conception of beauty/ in order to participate,/ to no longer see, but to be/ part/of it.
(L. Hankins, Dancer’s Prayer)
“I praise the dance, for it frees people
from the heaviness of matter
and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people,
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain,
will, or feeling.”
(Saint Augustine, In Praise of Dancing)
Both the poems invite the idea of community, of being part of. Augustine's influence can be seen also elsewhere. In the poem no. V, of the third section titled “Weak Devotion”
“Our holiest act is to enter into mystery,
just as God's holiest act was to enter
into mortal flesh,into death --
the only mystery available to Him.”
the influence of the saint and philosopher from Hippo is patent:
“Without God, man cannot. Without man, God will not.”
-St. Augustine
Contradiction and uncertainty in experiencing faith, turns out to be essential to Hankins' inspiration. Emblematic of the pivotal role played by God in the poet's work , is
"Portrait of Myself as a Barbarian". The *barbarous century*, is evocative of how nature would lose meaning not only in a pre-scientific age ("long before before the invention of eyeglasses") but in a godless age; although God is not mentioned the image of the poet who stumbles "from the fireside" (...) "heading for my hut/but in the wrong direction" sounds allusive to a loss caused by the absence of God. It is like groping in the dark. Totally antithetic to the "woods full / of phantom impediments--" in this poem, stands the woods where the poet is drawn through by the antlers of a deer, in "Elusive Animal, Carry Me". It is remarkable that one of the strongest symbol of North American literature, the deer, precisely of the so called "bildunsgroman" (narrative of initiation), rather than being the victim of a neophyte who will pass from the status of a child to the status of adulthood, becomes a sort of sacred guide that brings the neophyte to safety.
An incarnation of God? A desire to be guided by Him to cross the tangled woods? Perhaps. The fact is that Luke Hankins has a lot in common with those poets who, from the ancient world, foreran modernity. He expresses through poetry the need for archetypes by re-establishing them.
December 25, 2023
I read a lot of unknown poetry I pick up for cheap in used book stores; this might be the best collection I read this year, or at least the most in line with my tastes -- a bunch of fucked up depressed religious prayers... someone's been reading John Donne and looking at the trees in Asheville NC.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews