‘A Kind of Blessing’: David Malouf and the spirit of the embodied word.

Body, spirit and creative word are significant elements in David Malouf’s work: his imaginative and poetical language gives voice to the subtleties of life, revealing both their spiritual and physical dimensions. My analysis is based on the work of the anthropologist and macro-historian Riane Eisler and on Raimon Panikkar’s theory of the creative word versus scientistic term. I will use the intercultural and partnership perspectives of Panikkar and Eisler’s work as a philosophical and critical background to show how in his work Malouf gives form to a world of spiritual epiphanies, with the realities of everyday life transmuted into a spiritual dimension through the intensity of the creative imagination.