Peter Russell's "Albae Meditatio"
 

I hesitated to post a longish essay (about 20 pages) on a longish poem (about 170 lines), but decided to do so because the British poet Peter Russell has so few readers these days and my essay on him came out in a UK journal people here probably haven't seen: Temenos Academy Review. It appeared an issue that came out at the end of 2017.

My preamble to the essay will tell you about Peter Russell himself. The poem itself is one of his best. It's one I've gone back to several times, and others who like Russell's poetry also tend to be drawn especially to "Albae Meditatio."

If you enjoy sprawling free-ish verse poems with metaphysical themes presented by means of vivid concrete imagery and symbolism with a heterodox mix of sources, especially Sufi . . . this poem might be your cuppa as it is mine.

Sphere software doesn't accept PDFs of the size I was doing to attach, so I'm going to post a link to the poem here, and a link to the essay, here. They can be read there or downloaded for reading later.

Happy reading, anyone who wants to have a go at it.