February 2003 ISBN 1-55380-003-6 BISAC: POE000000, POE005000, POE003000  6 X 9 107 pp $13.95  Poetry, Spirituality.

At the Mercy Seat explores how the relentlessness of mercy permeates the natural world, our domesticity and our relationships, and opens them to mystery. The collection is arranged in three sections entitled "The Names of Green," poems of spirit-enfolding nature; "Ob-La-Di, Ob-la-da, (Life in the Burbs)," lyric meditations on sacred eruptions in the everyday; and "Matrilineal Lines," poems of parenting and the origins of song. These various themes interweave throughout the book so that spirit and matter, the sacred and profane, the delicate and the disturbing are part of a unified field. Whether the poems reclaim biblical stories or the voices of McCaslin's poetic progenitors, they are compelling and finely nuanced events leading to a contemplative being in the world. This is a book about thresholds: the meeting places of silence and language, suburbia and coastal wilderness, the seemingly disparate worlds of parent and child, husband and wife. The poems remind the reader that magical transformations can occur at places both "here" and "there," that we are all to some extent "threshold dwellers," that divine mercy still breaks into the middle of our most ordinary lives: "Then a sudden rupturing of the fabric — jagged edge of raw blue silk torn from its skein."

"At the Mercy Seat offers a message we need listen for: 'Live like a field lily,' McCaslin urges, 'springing back.'" — Kate Braid

Susan McCaslin is a poet and Instructor of English at Douglas College in Coquitlam, BC. She has published six volumes of poetry and edited the anthologies A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry (Ekstasis, 1998) and Poetry and Spiritual Practice (St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2002). Susan lives in Port Moody, BC, with her husband and daughter.