SONG THAT BLESSES EARTH
Hymn Texts, Carols, and Poems
By Thomas H. Troeger
Oxford University Press. 109 pages. £15.50
ISBN 978 0 193 405 493
One hymn illustrates how brilliant and how baffling is this North American scholar-poet from Yale: ‘Above the moon earth rises, a sunlit, mossy stone.’
Like most of his verse, it is biblically rooted, meticulously crafted and imaginatively developed. It could only have been written in our generation and many of our songs seem, by comparison, both clumsy and self-absorbed. It has begun to appear in UK hymn-books, but you have probably never sung it.
