Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an intense, visionary work, suffused by images of apocalypse. It presents the environmental crisis as not merely stupidly self-destructive but sinful, a perverse violation of the sacredness of earth.

The book is structured around the Roman Catholic mass for the dead and the burial rite that follows it. It’s divided into four sections, ‘Kyrie’, ‘Dies Irae’, ‘Libera Me’ and ‘In Paradism’ (sic) preceded by an introductory poem, ‘What My Body Showed Me’, and succeeded by ‘Morning’. The title’s “passage” is a movement through imminent catastrophe to a hoped-for new life in healthy relation to the … Continue Reading