Tourist out of Time: Fifty Poems from Fifty Years

Tourist out of Time by Fr. David May is a collection of fifty poems written over fifty years, beginning with the poet’s first summer after high school and following his journey into the priesthood, the poustinia, and the beginnings of Parkinson’s disease.

As the poet ventures deeper into the Ontarian backwoods he embarks also on a pilgrimage into the depths of the heart – his own, that of others, and ultimately the inexhaustible heart of God. This memoir in verse testifies to the unyielding nature of life’s most urgent questions, and is above all an unflinching exploration of suffering, God, and the suffusion of an ordinary life with intimations of the divine.

Reviews:

“This collection of a half-century of poems by Fr. David May is one of those extraordinary banquets that divine providence is pleased to give us from time to time: his is that rarest of qualities, a highly de­veloped poetic sense beautifully integrated with penetrating spiritual awareness, not a word of which fails to breathe authenticity. They are the fruit of a life laid down and poured forth, distillates of lived experience of both joys and sorrows, of long desolations and flashes of light from the infinite, of radical honesty and searing beauty. Go gently as you ponder these poems, dear reader, as you will herein encounter the sacredness of the ‘ordinary’, and Christ hidden and revealed among us in our common humanity.”– Michael D. O'Brien, Artist and author of Father Elijah and By the Rivers of Babylon

“The poems in Tourist out of Time have as a background the geogra­phy of daily life at Madonna House, the seasons of the natural world and the liturgy, the quotidian rhythms of a community striving to live the Gospel with integrity and generosity. But its geography is also intensely personal, as Fr. David lets the reader into the full range of his most profound grappling with life, including intimate moments of deep longing and of grace…. These are poems of a searching dis­cipleship, ever honest, often raw, more penetrating as the years pass.” – Most Rev. Donald Bolen, Archbishop of Regina and co-author of Transfiguring Prairie Skies

“Fr. David May’s poems have the same incandescent honesty as his preaching, always seeking the display of the highest and most sub­lime things in the lowliest and humblest places. In the eyes of faith, the presence of the Most High in day to day life is not a matter of sentimentality or wishful thinking, but pain and longing touched by joy. This book is a treasure.”– Zena Hitz, Author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life

About the author Fr. David May

128 pages —Trade Paperback, 5.5” x 8.25” — Madonna House Publications, 2023 — ISBN 978-1-77312-017-1

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