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.

Wendell Berry*

Wendell Berry (1934—2026) is a poet who has touched me deeply over the years, and so I mourn the news of his passing. He died on Monday, August 31, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky — a place he celebrated under the disguised name of Port William in his twelve novels.

According to Christianity Today, Berry “attended Port Royal Baptist Church in his small town of fewer than 100 people. He joked about his erratic Sunday morning attendance, labeling himself a ‘marginal’ or ‘forest’ Christian who preferred to wander into the woods in nice weather than to plant himself in the pews.” This description corresponds with the poems he wrote known as “Sabbaths” primarily written from his meditative Sunday morning walks.

In one of them, from his recent book Another Day he says:
----"On the morning of the first day
----the old shepherd comes early
-------------------…It is the morning
----also of the resurrection of Christ,
----the lamb of God, His people’s shepherd…"

In one interview he said, “I still consider myself a person who takes the gospels very seriously. And I read in them and am sometimes shamed by them and sometimes utterly baffled by them.”

The following is a Wendell Berry poem I included a decade ago in my anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry.

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

*This is the fifth Kingdom Poets post about Wendell Berry: first post, second post, third post, fourth 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.