The Vagabond Scholar

""The Vagabond Scholar is wisdom transposed into infinite texture and oceanic memory. It is consummate and ineluctable poetry made of intimacies and images compressing time and place, sheltering the deep and pure. Here we find perfect words beneath sunlit words formed from motion and music. William Franke's poetry excavates the interior mercies that beckon bodies to be embraced. This collection is a gift of companioning, of that exquisite and sacred seal uniting mind and heart."" --Caitlin Smith Gilson, Professor of Philosophy, St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary ""William Franke wrote these lyrics on the cusp of his doctoral studies, as he finished a master's degree at Oxford and then traveled through continental Europe. Collected here for the first time, these poems reveal how the 'inward hours' of study and the vivid experiences of life abroad shaped one of the great humanists of our day."" --Steven Knepper, author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond ""William Franke's writing, even in its academic mode, has always been poetic because it has always concerned itself with what animates but never finalizes itself within language. That Franke has been writing poetry his whole career is no surprise. Here we get a collection of early poems written on the move that anticipate, and perhaps unsay, all the later academic work. Beyond speech, there is silence, and beyond silence, there is poetry."" --Peter Kline, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, St Francis College, University of Divinity