ISBN: 0-9691054-0-1
$10.00,  $ 8.00 Online Price   
 Original Copies, 96 pages
Paperback with French flaps.

Testament of a Mystic

Posthumous Poems (1977 - 1980)
of Shirley Thérèse Lewis,
edited and with an Introduction by Paul Hourihan

A brighter light invested her,
It turned the room to stone,
And in her aftermath of glow,
A phoenix burned alone.

In 1982, Dr. Paul Hourihan edited and published a book of poems by his late student and close friend, Shirley Thérèse Lewis, whose work reveals the mind of a born poet. She did not discover her calling until she was forty and alas, had but a few years to harness her vision of life before cancer struck her down. Her poems show the development of a mystic mind, which through meditative practice and inward discipline, achieved deep reserves of spirituality that combated the destructive disease, leaving her, in the process, purified and transformed.

We believe the time has come again to bring this work back into the light of day for others to benefit. Copies from the original printing are available.

From the Introduction:
Ultimately what brings a person to the threshold of saintliness is what they are―their character is their destiny. So with Shirley Thérèse Lewis. In her own estimate she was no candidate for spiritual legend, but her character, glowing with its quiet, gem-like radiance, made her such. In life luminously introspective, self-effacing, she emerges in this posthumous volume as a modern mystic in quest of divine realization, receiving as one answer to her call the agony of cancer, which for twenty-one months besieged and finally in February 1981 overcame her at the age of 44 in the bedroom of her Guelph, Ontario home....

Privately she confided that her two given names dramatized the disparate spheres of her existence. Shirley represented the ordinary, everyday part of her personality with its traditional duties and the role she assumed to carry them out as adaptively as possible. Thérèse invoked the poetic, romantic, mystic part of her life―the inner life―and included the consciousness to which she aspired: the saint’s. She acted as Shirley with others while thinking of herself as Thérèse and feeding that part of her being with meditation, with poetry, with dreams. Her life-conflict, or quarrel with herself, was symbolically a conflict between her two names and the antagonistic realities they embodied....

At its best her art achieves effects comparable to those of Emily Dickinson, whose influence is evident throughout, though the author’s own impress is always unmistakable. Her power of distilling a remarkable degree of significance in a few lines almost equals that of her Amherst mentor, with whom she felt a unique bond. Many of the poems are like atoms of thought that must be split―by an intensity of reader-concentration matching the heat of her own―before the explosion of meaning follows, a sudden piercing through the veil into a luminous area of the mind were truth abides....

What we might have received from her in wisdom and insight as her powers matured we can only conjecture and sorely regret never having. Just as her friends have suffered the loss of her charismatic presence, so potential readers ever in need of spiritual guidance among the shoals and snares of our times will have suffered another kind of loss, one perhaps as irreparable.... Intellectually and spiritually endowed to cope with the most challenging subjects, with a power of expression matching the seriousness of her themes, and sustained by a hieratic consecration to the art of poetry itself, she possessed every gift to have made her work esteemed and treasured.

Reviews/Readers' Comments

"It is clear that by her death I have lost the opportunity to encounter both a remarkable intelligence and an extraordinary personality. In an aphorism that seems to be echoed in the volume's title, Yeats said that we make rhetoric out of our quarrels with others, poetry out of our quarrel with ourselves: Shirley Thérèse Lewis' astonishingly compressed process of development as a poet seems to be closely connected with her instinctive understanding of this insight. The poetry that she did have time to leave behind her reflects not only her giftedness but her courage both to live and die with a rare intensity."
            – Northrop Frye, Eminent Canadian Scholar & Thinker, from a letter dated December 14, 1983.

"My Quarrel With Myself is a powerful, compact collection of provoking ideas. Its lack of clear image, next to obscure, makes the reading and re-reading more tantalizing.... Shirley Thérèse Lewis did not write for people seeking entertaining, comfortable verse ... but for people seeking the "how" of life's truth―spiritual perfection. We should be grateful that Shirley's use of the poetic process achieved such heights in the brilliant, but brief, period of time that was given her."
                               – Robin Baird Lewis, The Guelph Alumnus, Winter 1983.