Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah

Reviews / Votes

This innovative and beautifully written monograph delves deep into the poetic vision of the book of Isaiah. Landy's powerful prose creates a gallery of evocative and conflicting images, as he lays bare the inherently dialectic character of the book. All its central characters - God, Jerusalem, the Davidic heir, even death itself - are unstable entities that evolve and metamorphose throughout the book, yet ultimately return to their earlier state. God, Isaiah's male protagonist is also a gender-fluid deity, Jerusalem, his female counterpart, is simultaneously an attractive Edenic beauty and a soiled object of abhorrence, and the prophet turns out to be a liminal figure who negotiates between the two. * Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, Professor in Old Testament Exegesis, ALT School of Theology * It is an unusual approach, but a stimulating one that brings this complex prophetic book alive in new ways. * Church Times * This is a significant work grounded in Landy's distinguished career as a reader of the book of Isaiah. The introduction is a well-informed overview of some key critical issues in Isaiah, and almost reads like an introduction to a commentary. The rest of the book, however, is a literary exploration of only selected portions of the book, organized around a set of themes including parenthood, gender, death, kingship, and exile.... In the conclusions, he self consciously engages the methodological issues around synchronic and diachronic readings of the book. L. acknowledges his work can be dense and not thesis driven, but for those who know the book of Isaiah well, this is rich and essential reading. * JSOT Booklist * This book is a gift to its readers and to Isaiah's. We are in Frances Landy's debt for having written it. * J. Blake Couey, RBL 04/2024 * Like a beautiful bouquet, Francis Landy's newest book treats readers to an efflorescence of various passages from the book of Isaiah, each one an exquisite specimen, altogether a breathtaking arrangement. A similar work would be difficult to find...Landy is one of the most sensitive, creative, thoughtful, and knowledgeable critics in the field, and I cannot overstate my recommendation of this book as a remarkable achievement that will be an incredibly helpful resource for all who work on Isaiah for the foreseeable future. * Davis Hankins, RBL 04/2024 * Francis Landy has always made the case for prophetic literature as poetry. In this book, he marshals theoretical, thematic, and intertextual evidence to present Isaiah as a poet engaged in multiple forms of communication. Landy does well to separate the purported Isaiah from the book of the same name, though recognizing that the power of textuality obscures the relationship with this nonwriting author and the economics and politics of book making. * Steed Vernyl Davidson, RBL 04/2024 * [Landy's] deconstructive approach reveals various fissures in Isaiah's poetry and imagery, which underscore a fundamental indeterminacy in its prophetic imagination. In a world where simplification is often held to be a virtue, letting the text continue to be strange and obscure is a challenge - one that more of us should take up. This book is the result of a lifetime thinking and writing about the book of Isaiah. It wears its erudition lightly, but that erudition infuses every page ... Landy engages closely with the Hebrew and delights in alliteration, word play, and resonances of words. The book is a tour de force and an outstanding piece of biblical scholarship both because of its sophisticated methodology and its insights into Isaiah as an anthology of prophetic poetry. * The judges of the R.B.Y. Scott Award, Canadian Society of Biblical Studies * Landy's work in biblical studies certainly has important implications for the study of religion. He shows us the complexity of meaning, that we should not shy away from the difficulty it engenders, and the poetic play of the interpretive act. Taken together, we witness in his work the idea of human ingenuity-in our data and in ourselves-which constantly strives to make sense of the worlds we inhabit. * Aaron W Hughes, Studies in Religion *