John F. Deane*

John F. Deane, one of Ireland’s finest living poets, has published more than a dozen poetry books. His most recent collection is Jonah and Me (Carcanet, 2025) following his recent Selected and New Poems (2023).

Of this new book, Rowan Williams has said, “These beautiful pieces, with all their clear and sensuous detail, are the work of a profound imagination constantly letting itself be ‘startled into certainties’…”

Deane is the founder of Dedalus Press — where he served as editor from 1985 to 2006. He has also been a visiting scholar in the United States: in 2006 at the Burns Library of Boston College, in 2016 at Loyola University in Chicago, and in 2019 at Notre Dame University in Indiana.

Through the years I have sought to bring his work to the attention of poetry readers in North America. Most recently, I have included three of Deane’s poems in my new anthology Unto Us A Child Is Born: The Kingdom Poets Book of Christmas which appeared this month (Poiema/Cascade).

Back in May, my wife and I met John Deane and Gerard Smyth at a Dublin pub to deepen connections, talk poetry over lunch, and to exchange books. The following poem is from Jonah and Me.

Wakening

He found the body gross, like mutton-fat,
the mind sour as buttermilk, as crud.
Now he wakes with dawn, still in darkness,

grown old, bones creaking like a grating door.
Sometimes he feels like the farmyard mutt
useless on three legs, all straggling hairs;

what wisdom he bears is useless as a shadow,
eyes lifeless as pond-water. But he has settled
to a comforting placidity. Prayer is silence,

spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.
He moves towards the judgement-door, and —
though humankind has mapped the galaxies,

filled grains of sand into a glass and called it
time — he knows the young man Lazarus fell asleep
and Jesus, weeping, slowly moved to waken him.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about John F. Deane: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including, The Role of the Moon, from Paraclete Press — which received a Gold Medal (Poetry) at the Illumination Book Awards (USA) and also won the 2026 Word Award for Poetry (Canada). His earlier books — including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and his new anthology, Unto Us A Child Is Born: The Kingdom Poets Book of Christmas — are available through Wipf & Stock.

Catharine Savage Brosman

Catharine Savage Brosman is a poet, essayist and scholar of French literature. She is Professor Emerita at Tulane University.

She lived in New Orleans for more than forty years, but now lives in Houston, Texas.

Born in 1934, Brosman has published more than fifteen poetry collections, including Fire in the Mind: Poems New and Selected (Mercer University Press, 2026). Claude Wilkinson has called her "one of this country's finest poets."

The following poem appears in Fire in the Mind. The poem refers to an icon of Christ from the Deesis Mosaic in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.

Christ Pantokrator

His right hand raised, its slender fingers curled,
the left hand holding up the holy book.
He offers His salvation to the world,
and blessing from the One whom it forsook.

The figure dominates the apse, its cloak
of blue held-open, seeming to embrace
all those who would assume His gentle yoke,
and find redemption in His sacred face.

Reflections from the dome illuminate
with gold the nimbused cross around His head;
below, archangels, Virgin saints await
the resurrection of the ransomed dead.

His steady eyes appear to turn their gaze
on every viewer—deep, unblinking, dark,
yet luminous and searching as the rays
that light the nave, the covenant’s new ark.

Anonymous, just strangers in a crowd,
like those who stood on a Judean hill
to watch, and heard Him as He cried aloud,
we know the power of His passion still.

The letters come alive, the voice is clear,
as though, through two millennia, we heard
the Christ Pantokrator among us here
proclaim, in words, Himself, the perfect Word.

What of this wonder can I take away—
with photos, and a very human pride?
The palm of life, a soul become the prey
of burning love, the body glorified.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This post was first suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Nikki Grimes

Nikki Grimes is a poet, and an author of literature for children and youth. She was born in Brooklyn, but now lives in California. She has published more than 100 books, and received numerous awards and honours, including the Coretta Scott King Award for her teen novel Bronx Masquerade (Dial Books, 2002), and The Lion & The Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. She was a 2023 Black Authors Hall of Fame Inductee, and The Poetry Foundation has just appointed her to be the 2027–2028 Young People’s Poet Laureate.

In an interview she said,
----“Art has the power to enhance all of our lives. It is a vehicle for
----us to learn about each other, to discover the ways in which we are
----more alike than different. It is a vehicle that allows us to
----communicate with each other and it opens up places in us that allow
----the Creator God to speak to us so that when we go out on a hike and
----we pause to watch a sunset, perhaps we appreciate it in a new
----way—the beauty of it.”

Each of the poems in her collection Glory, Too (Paraclete Press, 2025) is built from reflections on scripture. The source for the following poem is 1 John 1:1-4; it comes from Glory, Too, and also appeared in the new Paraclete gift book Count It All Joy (2026).

Source

The recipe for joy:
Take one babe, one boy,
Who became a man.
Not just any babe
Not just any boy.
Not just any man,
But the Son
who made the sun and moon
and all we see.
He is the source.
His course is the one
we must sail
to reach happiness.
This voyage,
the sturdy fellow-ship
he steers
as captain of the heart.
Our part—black, brown
white or otherwise
is to climb aboard,
giving up our “I”
and “me” and “mine”
and leaving behind
hurt and hate
and all that would separate
us from him, who is
the babe, the boy, the man,
the Son, the Savior
the source of all
the happiness and joy
we, together,
can ever hope to know.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Czeslaw Milosz*

Czeslaw Milosz (1911—2004) is a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. At that time he was not well known; he wrote in Polish which hindered his international recognition, while the Soviet leadership of Poland censored his work back home.

He lived through many years of oppression at the hands of both the Germans and the Russians, and only chose to defect once it was impossible for him to remain in Warsaw. He experienced the German invasion of his hometown when a teen during WWI, and witnessed Nazi soldiers burning down Warsaw in August 1944. He has written,
----“I do not regret those years in Warsaw, which was, I believe,
----the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe. Had
----I chosen emigration, my life would certainly have followed a
----very different course. But my knowledge of the crimes which
----Europe has witnessed in the twentieth century would be less
----direct, less concrete than it is.”

He accepted a post at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, and lived in a cottage overlooking the bay for forty years. Even so, he continued writing his poetry in Polish, often about his experiences in Poland, and about aspects of life his European experience stirred in him. In his book of essays Visions from San Franscico Bay his faith is well-declared when he says,
----“There is the warm, human presence of a God who took on flesh
----in order to experience our hunger and our pain, so we would
----not be doomed to strain our eyes upward but could be nourished
----by words spoken by lips like our own. And the God-man is not
----one of us in our moments of pride and glory but one of us in
----misfortune, in slavery, and in the fear of death. The hour
----when he agreed to accept suffering conquers time; centuries
----of change and passing civilizations are insignificant and
----short-lived, and no wasteland of cement, glass, and metal will
----make man different from those men Christ addressed in Galilee…”

The following poem was translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky.

Veni Creator

Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lifts its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Czeslaw Milosz: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Ashley Anna McHugh

Ashley Anna McHugh is a formalist poet whose first book, Into These Knots (Rowan & Littlefield, 2010), was the winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. About it, Andrew Hudgins wrote, “The poems in Into These Knots are graceful and powerful in equal measure – beautifully written raids on the inarticulate from a clear-eyed poet probing the beginnings of song in the unsayable…”

She was the executive editor of Measure Review, but has since closed the journal. She has one additional collection, a chapbook called Become All Flame. Her work has also been included in Luke Hankins’ anthology Poems of Devotion (Wipf & Stock, 2012). She is presently compiling her next full-length collection which she calls How to Burn.

The following poem first appeared in Literary Matters.

Adam, Waking

Magnolia blossoms: lustrous as the moon
and smooth as ivory, soft against his skin—
but even in his dreams, he’s cursed: as soon
as he reaches out, they fall apart—again,
again—that vision of the delicate
ghostly petals strewn across the stone,
the distant knowledge of the guarded gate—
and his waking realization:
-------------------------the Garden is gone.
Restless now, he stares at the rising sun,
that golden apple laid in a pool of blood—
but the lambs were sacrificed,
-------------------------the seed was sown,
and remembering the past has done no good.
But then the birdsongs quicken, still the same,
so with a broken voice, he recites each name.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (1945—2026) is an American author best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1975). Her novel The Maytrees, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award in 2008. She taught for 21 years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She was presented the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama at the White House in September 2015. She died September 15, 2026, at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Her poetry collections include, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), and Mornings Like This: Found Poems (1995). In her first book her poem “Christmas” says,
------This is the hour
------God loosens and empties.
------Rushing, consciousness comes
------unbidden, gasping,
------and memory, wisdom, grace.

She wrote for the Christian Century back in 2020, “I identify as a Christian. Many Christians would disagree that I can use the term honestly.”

The following was not written as a poem, but is a prose piece from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that has been reformatted as a poem (for the blog saltproject.org). That her prose stands up as poetry, says much about her approach to writing.

Why so many forms?

Why so many forms?
Why not just that one
hydrogen atom?
The creator goes off
on one wild, specific
tangent after another,
or millions simultaneously,
with an exuberance
that would seem to be
unwarranted, and with
an abandoned energy sprung
from an unfathomable font.
What is going on here?
The point of the dragonfly’s
terrible lip, the giant water bug,
birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle
and flash of sunlighted minnows,
is not that it all fits together
like clockwork — for it doesn’t,
particularly, not even inside

the goldfish bowl — but that
it all flows so freely and wild,
like the creek, that it all surges
in such a free, fringed tangle.
Freedom is the world’s water
and weather, the world’s nourishment
freely given, its soil and sap:
and the creator loves pizzazz.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Steven Peterson

Steven Peterson is a poet and playwright who divides his time between Chicago and northern Wisconsin. His plays have been produced at theatres across the States, from coast to coast. He turned to poetry when the Covid pandemic halted live performances, and he continues in this new passion.

His debut poetry book, Walking Trees and Other Poems (2025) is published by Finishing Line Press. They are known as a chapbook press (perhaps the best known in the U.S. — I have Finishing Line chapbooks on my shelf by Ryan Apple, Susan Cowger, Dave Harrity, and Laura Reece Hogan) but this is clearly a full-length collection.

Peterson’s voice is quite diverse — sometimes writing structured, rhyming poems. Personally, I prefer his free verse, but he also charms me with some of his light, humorous pieces:
------“My doctor said I’m diabetic,
------But here’s what’s even more pathetic…”

He has contributed several times to my Poems For Ephesians web-journal. I was fortunate to see him again at The Christian Century event at the Festival of Faith & Writing this spring. The following poem is from Walking Trees, and previously appeared in First Things.

All Bright Things

At Chartres, we see the stained-glass windows slump
from centuries of gravity, becoming
thicker glass at bottom than the top,
like waterfalls of slow and liquid sand.

In Athens, temples, sculpture, palaces
had first been painted bright as Disneyland,
but when the paint was gone we strangely liked
them bleached and bare like piles of human bone.

And in Jerusalem, Ezekiel wrote,
the Glory of the Lord rose like a cloud,
lingered at the Temple door, floated up
the hill to look back once before the Exile.

So all bright things return to dust and cloud;
the psalmist sang, “Go back, O child of earth.”
Yet in that cloud is rain, and in that dust
is Christ arisen, making all things new.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.