… only speak the word, and my servant will be healed …

The story in Matthew’s Gospel is about words and their power to heal. The story is also about pain and loss, suffering and distress, hope and wonder. In a sense, it is also the story of every person’s journey in faith, with elements of fear, apprehension, unspoken doubt, unexpected joy, renewed life.

These are experiences reflected in Poems of Lament and Grace. The author gladly acknowledges that her own faith journey has involved times of faith and doubt, uncertainty, longing, apprehension.

Yet, this deeply honest series of poems – words of healing – acknowledges times of discouragement and dismay, but above all rejoices in divine grace, offered and lived.

Any poetry that tries to speak honestly and freshly out of the journey of faith will be a poetry of loss, not only of celebration, and these poems do full justice to that, never shirking the tracklessness of the land or the sea where the journey is taking us.     Bishop Rowan Williams

Dorothy Lee’s Poems of Lament and Grace is a book rich in times and seasons, reaching back to classical Greece and reaching out to embrace ‘all the vastness’ found between ordinary letters and ‘the depths / of love and plenitude and silence’. These are poems that probe the struggles that fill our lives of faith and questioning, of hope and weariness.  Kevin Hart – The University of Virginia

These poems are vivid with feeling and intellect. They pattern a call and response between the poet and her world, both inner and outer, with rhythms that fall into the natural pattern of speech even as the ideas take us to the infinitely great and the infinitely small.  Katherine Firth – The University of Melbourne

Dorothy Lee is a writer, academic and priest who studied at the University of Sydney where she gained a PhD in Religious Studies. She now lectures at Trinity College in the University of Divinity. She has published in the areas of Scripture, spirituality and feminist theology and is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Dorothy’s hobbies include reading, writing, visiting family and friends, and playing with her four grandchildren and her two Tonkinese cats. Cover photograph of St Catherine’s Monastery, Mt Sinai, is by Bradley Cummings.