Leslie Leyland Fields

Leslie Leyland Fields is an Alaskan writer who has published twelve books, including Your Story Matters (2020, NavPress), Crossing the Waters (2016), and the poetry collection The Water Under Fish (1994). She has taught at the University of Alaska, and is a founding faculty member of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program. She also founded the Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, an annual writing retreat on her family’s wilderness island in Alaska.

She and the poet Paul J. Willis have just had a new collection of Advent readings published by IVP: A Radiant Birth: Advent Readings for a Bright Season. It consists of 42 readings from the first Sunday of Advent through to Epiphany written by members of the Chrysostrom Society. Some of these readings are poems, while others are stories and essays, and they come from such highly regarded writers as Luci Shaw, Robert Siegel, Diane Glancy, Eugene Peterson, and Madeleine L’Engle ― all of whom are (or were) members of the Chrysostrom Society.

The following poem is from Leslie Leyland Fields, and appears in A Radiant Birth.

Let the Stable Still Astonish

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: "Yes,
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
be born here, in this place?”
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
Of our hearts and says, "Yes,
Let the God
of Heaven and Earth
be born here―
In this place."

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Diane Glancy*

Diane Glancy is a poet of mixed heritage. Early in life she chose to be identified, with her father, as a Cherokee Native American. She has written extensively as a novelist, playwright, and nonfiction writer. As a poet she has published twenty titles — including both chapbooks and full-length collections. Glancy has received many awards including a Minnesota Book Award, an American Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and an Oklahoma Book Award.

In her new collection, The Book of Bearings, she takes on the confusion and conflict implicit in the collision of cultures that happened when Europeans began settling in North America. I am honoured to be the editor of this new collection for Cascade’s Poiema Poetry Series.

Glancy’s poetry has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, and in the anthology Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

The following poem first appeared in Caliban Online Journal, and is from The Book of Bearings.

St. Bo-gast-ah’s Confession to God in Later Years

All this—the Lord made me understand in writing—
I Chronicles 28:19

It was a daily fog.
Sometimes I cannot get off the floor.
I am a slug that moves across the step
leaving a silver trail.
To know there was a bright light from within.
To know it even in the darkness.

Have mercy on the uprooted.
On the unwanted.
On the made-over to fit somehow.
You reform us, Lord.
You yourself were remade to a man struggling
on the cross.
You were thought odd.
You were dismissed.
In that we are one.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Diane Glancy: first post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Diane Glancy

Diane Glancy is a Christian writer with a joint Cherokee and English/German family heritage. She is professor emerita at Macalester College. She has received many honours, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and the 2016 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Her Christian faith and native heritage intersect within her writing.

In her book The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris says:
-----"I once had the great pleasure of hearing the poet Diane Glancy
-----astound a group of clergy...by saying that she loved Christianity
-----because it was a blood religion. People gasped in shock; I was
-----overjoyed, thinking, Hit 'em, Diane; hit 'em where they live...
-----Diane told the clergy that she appreciated the relation of the
-----Christian religion to words. "The creation came into being when
-----God spoke," she said, reminding us of Paul's belief that "faith
-----comes through hearing." Diane saw this regard for words as
-----connected not only to writing but to living. "You build a world
-----in what you say," she said. "Words — as I speak or write them —
-----make a path on which I walk."

Some of Glancy's recent publications include three novels from Wipf & Stock — Uprising of the Goats, One of Us and Ironic Witness — and her most-recent poetry collection Report to the Department of the Interior (2015, University of New Mexico Press).

How to Explain Christ to the Unsaved

An awkward cousin who could not get a date, and you didn't know anyone who would go out with him. Too dark and ruddy. Too swarthy and crazy in the eye. He had a slow walk you could out-pace. He was someone you thought you could outrun. But he could stop you dead with something he said. Or his voice could break into thunder. He was? Concerned. Preoccupied. You remember Crazy Horse with his eye on the next world. His horse with a mission too. Not just holy but knowing how to get down to it of late. No one else would come by or call, but this cowboy who rode a donkey and would end up wearing a briar or thorns, would hang around. Who was this prophet, this traveling man, this nomad born with animals who never seemed to connect? He was jovial as a penitentiary. He became a grandfather spirit, and his believers, Black Elks who saw into the sky. He was too tall, too lanky. He was not always at the table for his cabbage and rabbit. He was a loner. Atonement was never a group act but for the sheep and bullocks and rams, I suppose, over the burnt alters of old encampments. But he was self-possessed. A mean Jesus and the soldiers nailed him to a cross. He was in hell three days and brought out everyone who wanted to take a salt bath in his seas and peel off their mind and squeal to enter his kingdom he had just named, heaven. Now he sleeps, they taunt, but it may be the sleep Adam slept when a rib was taken for you know who, and if Christ sleeps, it is the sleep while the cross is taken from him, called, rib bone for a bride.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Diane Glancy: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.