In the tumultuous spirit of the American South, A Carolina Psalter offers an outspoken conversation with King David’s Psalms, great outcries to a personal God. The Psalms, as a transformational work, sing out in the confident voice of a people unafraid to address the deity almost as an equal, and in some cases, as a friend. The poems in A Carolina Psalter address the God of the Psalms with questioning, irreverence, and occasional confrontation as we move into new understandings of Spirit. If we wish, we can experience the Psalms, indeed all the Bible, as living poetry, its metaphors breathing vibrant new life into our souls.
Tony Scully’s poems challenge what he calls “the war God of tradition,” often questioning whether that God, so often on the front lines of revenge and destroying one’s enemies, if not altogether absent during periods of loss and disaster, can possibly be God at all. His poems, although reflecting current thought and practice concerning the omnipresence of Spirit, spring from a well-founded history of believers, indeed, from the Bible itself, acknowledging the divine presence within. They assert the authority of the individual voice in a search for a God beyond accepted boundaries and definitions.
