Margaret Lancaster — The Kingdom of Silences

Margaret Lancaster left behind a single beautiful and elusive Los Angeles book. Printed at Abbey San Encino in 1933, The Kingdom of Silences gathers short devotional poems and aphorisms that move through hills, desert, clay, breath, birds, tears, and the discipline of inward attention. Many pieces last only a few lines; others widen into meditations on attachment, creation, suffering, and the divine presence Lancaster calls the Beloved. Almost nothing secure is yet known about her life, although surviving copies show that she continued giving the book to friends into the late 1930s. The mystery matters, but the writing does not need it: this is a complete reset of the original sequence, with each separately spaced lyric or aphorism given its own page and the book’s quiet architecture made newly legible.