A SILENCE FULL OF BELLS. MARIOLOGY

 

A SILENCE FULL OF BELLS

Dr Luky Whittle hails from Amsterdam, the land of windmills and tulips. Since her early teens she lived in the vibrant culture of South Africa. Dr Whittle's fascination with the Christ Child and His holy Mother Mary stemmed from her earliest memories. Interest in Marian theology led her to the United States where she researched the almost forgotten nun-poets genre. It was the belief of this professor of English that nun-poet contributions to Marian praise poetry should not be lost to future generations. The work of this group of highly creative and greatly talented women-poets contains profound spirituality. "A Silence full of bells" ensures that their contributions will never be forgotten. 

This anthology presents a body of poetry hitherto practically unknown and uncommented upon in literary histories – in the main, that of North American nun-poets of the 1920’s to the 1950s. Many of these nun-poets, far from being sequestered from the world in remote cloisters, were active in the world; many were members of the Catholic Poetry Society of America, founded in 1931. Their literary work, however, if disseminated at all, generally saw the light of day only in very ephemeral publications, and had thus within two decades became all but inaccessible to readers until Dr Luky Whittle returned it to its rightful place among the writing of the modernist period in her doctoral dissertation “Images of Mary”. The poems anthologized represent a selection from the work of the nun-poets investigated in that study, with the addition of several nun-poets working in later decades and in other countries, including South Africa. The poems have been chosen on the basis of the religious faith and devotion which they reveal, and the immediacy with which they engage the reader. Hence, the focus in this introduction is on the spiritual significance of the works, rather than on literary-theoretical critique.

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