Description
Book SynopsisLisa Martin’s new poetry collection seeks the kind of lyric truth that lives in paradox, in the dwelling together of seeming opposites such as life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt, joy and sorrow. Here readers will find a range of moods, tones, and subjects, as well as both traditional and contemporary forms—from sonnets to prose poems. This is a collection imbued with the light of an enduring, if troubled, faith. With its focus on spirit, ethics, and how to live well, Believing is not the same as Being Saved offers a tender meditation on the moments that make a life. There’s a way of speaking as if the difference matters, as if the road home is finite—everything begins and ends somewhere, like your hand in mine, or how last light fractures in the limbs of pine—while beyond my window, a coyote follows a trail into the dusk that only it can see. — from "Map for the road home"
Trade Review# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 02, 2017 * Edmonton Bestsellers *
# 4 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017
"Believing is not the same as Being Saved" is a quietly elegant book of poems.... You can see and feel the meticulous care Martin has taken in crafting these poems, constructing this book.... Martin understands that much of life is a paradox, that joy and sorrow are birds dancing on the same high wire." (Full review at http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2017/06/believing-is-not-same-as-being-saved.html) -- Michael Dennis * Today's Book of Poetry *
'[This] is an intricate collection of poems that meditates on pivotal traumatic events in the speaker’s life that challenge her faith.... In language that turns in and out of itself in finely tuned poetic phrasing, Martin deftly manages a vision that embraces death and loss as the other side of life and love and what matters most to us.... With poems that carry a religious and philosophic fervour—whose parallel in literary tradition might be Gerard Manley Hopkins with his rapturous sonnets that delve into his own faith and doubt about God – Martin’s verses are embedded with incandescent images from the natural world and are sinuous with thought riddled with paradox." The Goose, Vol. 16, Iss. 1 [2017] [Full review at http://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss1/10/] -- Gillian Harding-Russell
"Lisa Martin's "Believing is not the same as Being Saved" cleaves even closer to the holy, keeping religious motifs so near her natural language that they slip in unnoticed until they start to pile up, as in the various uses of the sword 'saved' in the title poem. Martin's best poems have a knack for reaching epiphanies by assiduously focusing and unfocusing their gaze.... Martin takes seriously the need to navigate between the philosophical and material worlds. " -- Jacob McArthur Mooney * Quill & Quire *
# 8 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, May 06, 2018
"... a careful examination of grief, change and the lines between things. Throughout the collection, Martin’s speaker is deeply attuned to the mutability of the world. Images blend, timelines shift, and everything changes.... Martin urgently carries life and death to the reader, not to provide answers or antidotes, but to do the important work of showing us the rawness of living in a world where good things end." [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/believing-is-not-the-same-as-being-saved-by-lisa-martin] -- Noah Cain * Prairie Fire *
# 5 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, March 1, 2020 * Edmonton's Bestselling Books *
#5 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, January 3, 2021
# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, May 9, 2021
# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, August 8, 2021
# 6 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, July 3, 2022
Table of Contents1 Believing is not the same as being saved I 5 One hundred ways to build the world 6 One thing 7 Firsts and lasts 8 Pool 9 Map for the road home 10 Memorial at Horseshoe Lake 11 The Ascension 12 Perspective 13 Sonnet for what we resolve into— 14 A solstice is an astronomical event 15 Story 16 Return 17 River 18 Bill of Rights 19 Singing in the spirit 20 The song of the spirit drawing near to the body 21 A small sigh, a hard thought, enters 22 Individualism 23 Bearings 24 Survival and all other possibles 26 If we understand the laws at all 27 Still life with white roses 28 Easter at the zoo for agnostics 30 Learning to speak and not to speak 31 Things I can and cannot do 32 Preserve of the useful 33 Sonnet for the distance between us 34 Lightening up 35 Birth weight 37 Lessening 38 Stories are for transforming ourselves 40 Some of what we know about airports in the 21st century 42 Vanity 44 Conversions 46 What I believe now about us then II51 Dog years 52 The opposite of the heart 53 Expiration 55 Separated 57 I-Thou 59 Adultery 60 Argument 61 On being in love 62 Fidelity 64 Weeping birch 65 Theology 66 Biology 67 The fine thinking 69 Heart 70 Friendship 72 Sonnet to myself and a stranger 73 Incandescent light 75 Elegy 78 Ecstasis 83 Circles 84 Dancing the path to understanding 85 Breathing in the northern forest 87 Acknowledgements
