And poets from Rainer Maria Rilke ( Book of Hours), to W.H. Umberto Eco used these “Hours” to divide his best-selling The Name of the Rose into chapters. The “Hours” referred to were the prayers of The Divine Office or “Liturgy Of The Hours”, prayed eight times a day by the religious (abbots, monks, nuns, canons) and clerics (priests, bishops and deacons): Vigils/Matins (middle of the night), Lauds (dawn), Prime (daytime), Terce (mid-morning), Sext (noon), Nones (mid-afternoon), Vespers (evening), and Compline (night prayer). Originally, a “Book of Hours” was a very small, hand-held liturgical/devotional text from the medieval times, usually illustrated. But what exactly is a “Book of Hours”? Or, rather, what was it? And what has it now become? Kevin Young’s new book of poetry is entitled Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014) and it is, as usual, excellent work from perhaps the greatest-or least the best-known-poet of his generation.
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