Bruno Glooms on the Bridge of Sighs by Raymond Barfield
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Bruno Glooms on the Bridge of Sighs
In Bruno Glooms on the Bridge of Sighs, Raymond Barfield reimagines the life of Giordano Bruno through the wreckage of an erotic obsession that becomes indistinguishable from cosmology itself. Bruno was praised as brilliant by kings and queens, but he was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Inquisition. In this sequence of 150 sonnets, Barfield records the temperature of a different kind of fire that burned in Bruno’s troubled relationships with a woman, the church, the universe, and God. Liturgical lament blends with metaphysical satire, the comedy of the grotesque, and erotic fury, as jealousy into is transformed into ontology and heartbreak into philosophical revolt. Through the lens of betrayal, he looks at reality and finds no fixed center, no lasting fidelity, and no reliable distinction between spiritual longing and bodily appetite. He tries, and fails, to resolve one final dilemma before he is done: Is his wild beloved’s erotic freedom a genre of spiritual authenticity or a self‑mythologizing attempt to live without consequences. The Inquisition asked a similar question about Bruno’s life. In these poems, Bruno invents a language to say Yes, and No, and Both, because, Why not?
Praise for Bruno Glooms on the Bridge of Sighs
… the lyrics in this book are intended as a form of meditation or prayer, for a contemplative practice and not purely for comprehension.… It is the alchemy of the sound play itself that serves as a metaphor for the soul’s desire: the body’s transubstantiation.… song has the final word here.… a re-enchantment of space that has been stripped bare of all significance by the irrationality of history, materialism, and capitalism.
—Alex Cigale, from the Foreword
With a deceptively sardonic wit, Raymond Barfield returns us to the post-Copernican dawn to imagine the private musings of Catholicism’s most scandalous heretics. Barfield’s Bruno is ablaze with such sensuality and decadence that we begin to feel in these pages . This is Bruno’s mystical cosmology as he himself might have imagined it.
—Casey Sharpe, Moon Draper
Paperback, 206 pp.
Publisher: Madhat, Inc.
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-968422-14-1
