The final volume of Frank Samperi’s major trilogy, following The Prefiguration and Quadrifariam, Lumen Gloriae is a book of radically compressed spiritual poetry: tiny verbal structures suspended in unusually generous fields of white space, where syntax, typography and silence are doing nearly as much work as the words themselves.

Samperi was influenced by Dante, Thomas Aquinas and the Objectivist tradition, but the resulting poetry is difficult to place neatly anywhere. Mystical vision passes through streets, bodies, weather and the ordinary particulars of New York; transcendence arrives not by escaping the material world but by looking at it until it begins to open. 

The title comes from the theological idea of the lumen gloriae, the “light of glory” through which the mind becomes capable of apprehending the divine. Samperi’s poems repeatedly test what language can do at that threshold. Words thin out, move across the page and become spatial events; apparently slight observations acquire a strange metaphysical pressure. The result is hermetic without being ornamental: austere, devotional and formally beautiful, especially for readers interested in concrete poetry, Objectivism, Catholic mysticism, Dante, or poets for whom the blank page is an active part of composition.

Grossman Publishers, 1973. First edition paperback, designed and produced by Mushinsha Limited, Japan; printed in Japan. Light rubbing, handling marks and age-toning to covers; internally clean and sound.