“The risk he takes, the range of problems he engages, the imaginative power of his mind, the sheer energy that pulses through these essays make this book essential for anyone who would understand the phenomenon—the gift—that bears the name John Milbank.”

“This is a marvellous collection of well-organized essays by perhaps the most thought-provoking theologian of the moment. They display an impressive range, are full of surprises, and are elegantly and engagingly written. They will confirm John Milbank’s reputation as one of the most accomplished and singular of theologians currently writing.”

“These essays, published over thirty years and gathered in this important new book, demonstrate the consistent acuity and imaginative power of John Milbank’s politico-theological vision. Milbank bestrides the Anglosaxon theological world with a project that is uniquely embedded in the romantic, anglocatholic, and socialist critiques of modernity from Coleridge to Ruskin. In this book we see the gradual repristination of these critiques against atheism, humanism, and neoliberalism, and the unfolding of a political theology after the secular in the form of a biblical and realist metaphysic and the neoplatonist sublime. The Future of Love is a powerful rendering of a truer and more virtuous life world than that delivered by the last thirty years of godforsaken market capitalism.”

“That John Milbank is an original and powerful theologian is well known. That he is a poet of lyrical and epic sensitivities will now become well known. Here we find piercing lyrics such as ‘Ode to Night,’ ‘Winter Interior,’ and ‘Cosmos.’ Here we find American and British landscapes, alive with history and nature: squirrels in ‘sculpted motion’ and a day ‘brushed with lemon.’ And here too we find the ambitious long sequence, ‘The Legend of Death,’ which, with its concatenation of story, creed, and place, is itself a theological work, one that could only be written as a poem.”

“This is a poetry of narrative intensity and lyric delicacy. Its sheer range and depth calls to mind ‘The Anathemata’ of David Jones.”

“John Milbank’s new book of poetry offers us a greatly extended and ambitious structure, concerned with humanity’s largest concepts across history and ideology as witnessed at their particular localites, as it were their homes in the landscape. I’m particularly glad that he has in this new venture maintained his sense of poetry as the proper vehicle of such vision, without letting it inflate. The poetry’s theses are discovered constantly anew with registers of surprise and wonder which amount to an interlocked modesty. So the discoveries are transmitted to us as an authentically poetical account which never deserts the particular, personal, and questing experience, the eyes on the landscape, the words held in their places by the rhythmic tension of constant realisation and renewal. It is a work of genuine illumination.”