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Paul Murray’s poetry is something very rare in literature: absolutely authentic, visionary, and consoling. Some of the subjects that he contemplates are innocence, memory, prayer, woundedness, grief, and divine joy. He takes us on a journey of brokenness and wholeness, unswerving in his scrutiny of darkness, but always—in breathtaking ways—showing us flashes of hope and insight that are lit with the presence of the divine and conveyed with disarming simplicity. This is a book to reach for in times of both tranquility and turbulence.

— Sally Read

Author of Night's Bright Darkness 

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Paul Murray is doing something rare and unsparing: in these poems, he is drawing from the deep sources of the Christian creative tradition confidently and without anxiety or apology, so that that tradition, and the spirit which animates it, feels just a hand’s-breadth away.

— Paul Elie

Author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach

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Fr. Paul Murray’s Light at the Torn Horizon has turned out to be a rare gift I had not expected. Reading these poems, poring over their beautiful clarity and humility, has been like meeting a soulmate—a Virgil, a Dante—on the journey toward that Light, conversing with words that crack open and sparkle with the divine Word.

— Paul Mariani

author of The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity

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In this new volume, in poem after poem, Paul Murray stands before the world, at once attentive to the raw and befuddled human condition and the intimations of wisdom that come, like music and mystery, to draw us toward the real. At times echoing the Eliot of Four Quartets, these poems call on us to return to the wonder in which every life begins.

— James Matthew Wilson

author of The Strangeness of the Good, Including Quarantine Notebook

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Reading Paul Murray’s poetry is like entertaining an archangel. Each poem in the collection announces a new incursion of the divine into the wounded world, offering us glimpses of beauty bodied forth in the most mundane objects, the everyday faces and places we encounter in our daily journey toward eternity. These are poems that celebrate and poems that save, sure poems, written by a seasoned poet confident in his voice and his vocation, a late collection wherein Murray repeatedly asks himself and joyfully answers the same question his master Rilke did: ‘And poet, what do you do?—I praise.’

— Angelo Alaimo O'Donnell

author of Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor