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.
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