Angels & Saints

Eliot Weinberger is a master essayist, a furious thinker and an exceptionally elegant writer. -- Jenny Diski In Angels & Saints, the beauty of Weinberger's prose is itself given a visual counterpoint in the multi-colored grid poems of ninth-century Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus. Each of his sentences thrums with its own vitality. Each subject feels like it's been granted a second life in text. -- Scott Beauchamp - Washington Examiner My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive. -- Gary Snyder - The New York Times Like Thomas Aquinas before him, Weinberger is a brilliant scholar in a dark age. -- Rain Taxi Weinberger delivers a meditation on the nature of angels and saints, illustrated with gorgeous reproductions of the works of ninth century German Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. An interpretation of angels concludes with a beautifully laid out 'angelology,' naming various angels and their powers, such as Mach, who can make one invisible. The rest of the volume is devoted to the stories of saints-some of which are quite lengthy, such as the biography of Saint Therese. Others are as brief as a sentence. (For John the Almsgiver, 'He never spoke an idle word.') Academic and lay readers interested in Christian thought will enjoy Weinberger's eclectic homage to angels and saints. -- Publishers Weekly (starred) Eliot Weinberger's Angels and Saints is glorious- a deeply scholarly and playful work, in which the mind of an essayist meets the sensibility of a poet. It is as lovely an object as its subject might require, illustrated by the grid poems of Hrabanus Maurus (circa 780-856), with an additional note on their complexities by Mary Wellesley. -- Anne Enright - NYRB