Jacob Stratman*

Jacob Stratman is the author of two poetry collections. His first, What I Have I Offer With Two Hands, is part of the Poiema Poetry Series (2019, Cascade). His new release is The Shell of Things (2024, Kelsay Books).

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner of The Christian Century says, “These are strong and sturdy poems,” but she reserves her highest praise for “the stunning, lyrical sequence which describes the author’s residency in Korea where ‘he can only see the shell of things’ as he lives in a new land and language, requiring acts of creation provoked by an unfamiliar setting as he finds his footing and searches for the words to describe what he observes.”

He is a professor and dean at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and two sons. As mentioned above, he and his family spent a year at Handong Global University in Pohang, South Korea, where he taught writing and literature courses.

The following poem is from The Shell of Things.

A Prayer for My 15-Year-Old, Who Is Set Apart

He won’t come out of his room very often—
only to eat what we’ve prepared, only to receive
love that doesn’t always look like anything he wants,
yet time is a friend of the God who creates it.


He won’t come out of his room very often,
or speak in complete sentences or listen
long enough to attend to the beauty of silences
yielded here, prepared just for him. Not yet.

He won’t come out of his room very often,
out of himself very often, but we will wait,
leaving this space empty of our wishes
You will fill with hope, with Your self.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Jacob Stratman: first post.

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.

Henry Constable

Henry Constable (1562—1613) is a poet and diplomat who is particularly known for one of the earliest sonnet sequences in English — Diana (1592). After graduating from Cambridge in 1580, he moved to Paris to begin his diplomatic career. From there he transferred to Heidelberg, and perhaps after that to Poland.

He spoke up in support of Protestant causes while at Queen Elizabeth’s court, where he became a favourite. In 1589 he was sent to Edinburgh to attend the marriage of King James VI of Scotland. Though at first outwardly appearing to be a Protestant, Constable eventually made public his conversion to Catholicism.

In 1595, Constable fled to the continent to avoid prosecution for his Catholic views. He wrote many letters to England, seeking assistance, visited Scotland, and around 1602 returned to England in secret. He was soon captured and held in the Tower of London. Even after his friend James I came to the English throne in 1603, he was not released — not until late in 1604. Several years later he left England for good, and died in Belgium.

O Gracious Shepherd

O gracious Shepherd! for Thy simple flock
By guileful goats to ravening wolves misled,
Who Thine own dear heart's precious blood didst shed,
And lamb-like offered to the butcher's block:
O gracious Shepherd! unremoving Rock
Of succour to all such as thither fled,
Respect one of Thy flock which followèd
These cursèd goats, and doth repentant knock,
To be with mercy taken to Thy fold.
I know Thy grace doth still for wanderers look;
I was a lost sheep once: dear Lord! behold,
And in compassion take me with Thy hook.
In one lost sheep new found, Thou dost rejoice;
Then know Thy sheep, which knows his Shepherd's voice.

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.

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich (1342―1416) is a mystic and theologian known almost exclusively through her writings, which are the earliest-surviving works in English by a woman. It is not even certain that her name was Julian, for that may have come from St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she lived most of her life as an anchoress.

Her story is that on the eighth of May, 1373, while she was believed to be on her deathbed, a curate, holding a crucifix above the foot of her bed was administering to her the last rites. Staring at the crucifix she began to lose her sight, and saw Jesus beginning to bleed. From this beginning she received sixteen visions of Christ.

The following excerpt, although not originally set out as poetry, has been placed in stanzas on the page to emphasize the poetic quality of Julian’s writings.

from Showings or Revelations of Divine Love

And in this he showed me a little thing
the quantity of a hazelnut,
lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed.
And it was as round as any ball.

I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding,
and thought, ‘What may this be?’
And it was answered generally thus,
“It is all that is made.”

I marvelled how it might last,
for I thought it might
suddenly have fallen to nothing
for littleness.

And I was answered in my understanding:
It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.
And so have all things their beginning
by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties.
The first is that God made it.
The second that God loves it.
And the third, that God keeps it.

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.

Pat Schneider

Pat Schneider (1934—2020) is a poet and workshop leader who founded Amherst Writers & Artists in Massachusetts in 1981. She served for thirty years as the director of AWA. She describes the writing method she developed to help others discover their deepest stories in her book Writing Alone and With Others (2003, Oxford University Press).

When she was ten, growing up in St. Louis, she was sent to an orphanage because of the difficulties her single mother faced with poverty. This experience influenced her, and her husband Peter (a Methodist minister) to devote themselves for years to social justice ministry.

She wrote five poetry collections, including Another River: New and Selected Poems (2005). She taught at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Connecticut, Smith College and was an adjunct faculty member at the Graduate Theological Union and Pacific School of Religion. She is also known for her libretti and plays, which have been widely performed, including at Carnegie Hall.

Welcoming Angels

Between the last war
and the next one,
waiting for the northbound train
that travels by the river,
I sit alone in the middle of the night
and welcome angels.
Welcome back old hymns, old songs,
all the music, the rhyme and rhythm,
welcome angels, archangels,
welcome early guesses,
at the names of things,
welcome wings.
I have grown tired of disbelief.
What once was brave is boring.
Welcome back to my embrace stranger,
visitor beside the Jabbok.
Welcome wrestling until dawn,
until it is my hip thrown out of joint,
my pillow stone, my ladder
of antique assumptions.
Welcome what is not my own:
glory on top rung, coming down.

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.

George Mackay Brown*

George Mackay Brown (1921—1996) is a poet of Scotland’s north coast Orkney Islands. He studied with Edwin Muir at Newbattle Abbey College, near Edinburgh, and earned his MA from the University of Edinburgh, where he did post-graduate research on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

While in Edinburgh he became part of the Milne’s Bar crowd, which included Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig. He was briefly engaged to Stella Cartwright — “the muse of Milne’s Bar” — but returned to his hometown of Stromness, where he lived unmarried for the rest of his life.

George Mackay Brown once wrote that his themes were "mainly religious (birth, love, death, resurrection, ceremonies of fishing and agriculture)…"

The following poem is from his collection Carve the Runes and appears in Selected Poems 1952—1992.

Daffodils

Heads skewered with grief
Three Marys at the cross
(Christ was wire and wax
festooned on a dead tree)

Guardians of the rock,
their emerald tapers touch
the pale wick of the sun
and perish before the rose
bleeds on the solstice stone
and the cornstalk unloads
peace from hills of thorn

Spindrifting blossoms
from the gray comber of March
thundering on the world,
splash our rooms coldly with
first grace of light, until
the corn-tides throb, and fields
drown in honey and fleeces

Shawled in radiance
tissue of sun and snow
three bowl-bound daffodils
in the euclidian season
when darkness equals light
and the world’s circle shudders
down to one bleeding point
Mary Mary and Mary
triangle of grief.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about George Mackay Brown: first post, second post.

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.