The Bible as Poetry

On the other hand, roughly one third of the Old Testament is poetry, at times as bristly and semantically layered as any high-modernist text; and much of the New Testament, including some of its crucial moments (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), consists of quotations or references to these ancient poems. It would seem, then, that if you can’t read poetry, a great part of the Bible is going to remain closed to you. And indeed this is just what Michael Edwards says in The Bible and Poetry, a short but hugely ambitious book whose aim is essentially to correct the course of Christianity.