Karen S Degenhart

Dark Night Where Angels Tread: a Poetic Descent Karen S Degenhart

Publisher Marketing: DARK NIGHT WHERE ANGELS TREAD is a very personal poetic account of a young woman's seven year inner schizophrenic-like journey through the descent and stages of depression and renewal. Spiritual and psychological insights are described as she experiences a confrontation with chaos, and struggles to organize her inner/outer world. Karen's poetic style ranges from short and simple to deep, long, and symbolically complex, as she is influenced by the moods of Herman Hesse and spiritual struggles of T. S. Eliot. These poems are a documentation of a lengthy inner crisis and an attempt to define Self and Reality during the years 1972 through 1978--approximately from her age 18 through age 24. Out of this DARK NIGHT -- A confrontation with Death, Madness, and the Existential Void of the Great Nothingness -- arose the Phoenix, the nucleus of anew self, which gradually transformed into the crystallized illumination of the Philosopher's Stone of realization -- the LAPIS -- and secret of inner transformation. With Karen's background in Jungian and Adlerian psychology, philosophy, mysticism, and literature, this poetry is guaranteed to be uniquely multi-dimensional in spite cf its personal expression, of pain mixed with ecstasy. Karen Degenhart graduated from Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois in 1976 with a Degree in English. She later received an MA. In Counseling, an MDiv. and a PhD. in Pastoral Psychotherapy. After this, she studied Shamanism. This is the SECOND edition of DARK NIGHT WERE ANGELS TREAD published in 2006. The first edition was printed in 1979. THANK YOU very much for your order! Cover photograph by Patrick Owens, 1976.