The Sunrise Liturgy

"The Sunrise Liturgy does what it says on the cover: it is a liturgical celebration of dawn. That is, it goes over again and again the kind of change that a new day is--materially and spiritually--and makes us participants in this event that makes the entire world look different. It is constantly surprising and very beautiful . . . It is by turns full of a Joycean exuberance and an extraordinary stillness. . . Exciting poetry, demanding and enlarging."

--Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury

Author of Christian Imagination in Poetry and Polity



"Here is something true--steadying, vivifying. I felt lifted and anchored by the reading. [Anderson's] distinctive narrative leaps, her metaphoric audacity, the graceful flexibility of her poetic mind lead us into a sensibility which amounts to a trued world."

--Tim Lilburn

Poet and essayist

2003 Governor General's Literary Award winner



"In a world full of voices eager to tell, to lay truth out for obedient consumption, how refreshing the buoyant, evocative, teasing, playful--and serious--voice of The Sunrise Liturgy. Spending time in these pages is like spending Saturday afternoon with a fearless child."

--Michael Thompson

General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada



"The liturgists of creation, from St Francis to Thomas Traherne, have always been a minority Magnificat. . . Here Mia Anderson joins their throng, introduces environmentalists to the liturgical year, challenges churchy believers with the swoops of a heron, and juxtaposes contemporary idiom with echoes deeply textured in the Christian tradition. The fine membranes between poetry and prayer, prophecy and play, perception and percussion become invisible. God's grandeur is alive once more as she hovers on the wind of the Spirit."

--Samuel Wells

Author of God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics



''This book of distinguished, searching and lyrical poems is close to a new mystic theology…. (it is) allusive, learned, exquisitely accomplished in its weaving of sound, suffused with a visionary and rapturous sense of nature, yet wryly playful at points… Compelling movement, clear images anchored in language and situation, the poems leap from place to thought, from thought to action, from action to repose.''

-- Juror's Comments for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry