Kevin Hart*

Kevin Hart is an Australian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He has taught at numerous schools, including Notre Dame University, University of Virginia, and is currently the Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of numerous scholarly books, including Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), as well as many poetry collections.

His new book, Carnets (Poiema/Cascade, 2025), is quite different than his other poetry books — probably quite different than any poetry book you’ve ever encountered. It consists of 500 single-line poems, or aphorisms. Here are a few of those which recently appeared in Ekstasis:

------If the words rise up to meet you, it’s poetry.

------Everything good was created by God; the rest, by committee.

------The truth is whole but mostly found in scraps.

------When you contemplate, time flows around you not through you.

I am honoured to have worked with Kevin Hart as editor for Carnets.

The following poem first appeared in the Tasmanian journal Forty South. The first half of the title is taken from some very old Chinese poems, and yet reminds me of similar epigraphs leading into several of the Psalms. Lake St. Clair, here, has nothing to do with the Ontario/Michigan border, but to the mountain lake in Tasmania.

To the Tune of “Early in the Morning”

Dissolving hills
Cradling Lake St. Clair:

The milky light of winter
In the early hours,

A forest old as rain
And a cold sky running south

As far as mind can see
With glaciers calving there.

God made the world
With just a breath:

Three days now
Of hiking through it.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Kevin Hart: first 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.

Mary Masters

Mary Masters (1694?—1759?) is a working class poet born in Otley, which is now part of the city of Leeds. She is referred to in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, where it’s said she occasionally visited Dr. Johnson, who revised her writings and "illuminated them here and there with a ray of his own genius." It is also known that she sometimes stayed at the home of Edward Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, when visiting London.

Her Poems on Several Occasions was published in London in 1733. Her second book Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions appeared in 1755. One brief poem from that book, which has been expanded into a hymn, is as follows:
------'Tis religion that can give
------Sweetest pleasures while we live.
------'Tis religion must supply
------Solid comfort when we die.

Masters included expanded versifications of Psalm 29, Psalm 37, Psalm 90, and Psalm 137 in her first collection. More faithful psalm versifications had already become a popular form of Christian poetry years earlier, including those from Sir Philip Sidney, and continued by his sister Mary Sidney Herbert. The following poem is Masters’ versification and expansion on Psalm 90, which according to tradition was written by Moses.

Psalm 90

------Verse I
Monarch of Heav’n, and Earth, and Sea,
Patron of Israel’s Progeny;
In every Clime from Age to Age
Our Line survives all hostile Rage,
With thy Divinity immur’d
As in a Dome of Rock secur’d.
------Verse II
Ancient of Days! Ere this wide Earth
With all her Hills disclos’d, to birth
Arose; ere you bright Lamps on high
Were kindled thro’ the boundless Sky;
Thou hadst a Life Eternal pass’d
That with Eternity shall last
------Verse III
But what is Man? thy sov’reign Doom
Soon hurls the Mortal to a Tomb:
“Return to dust,” thy voice commands,
Death hears, and sweeps off half the Lands.
------Verse IV
While so immense, thy Life appears,
That, ev’n a thousand rolling Years,
Diminish, in thy vast Survey,
To an elaps’d, forgotten Day:
Whole Ages vanish in thy fight
Like the short Portion of a Night.
------Verse V
How oft (amazing to behold!)
Destruction has her Torrents roll’d!
Born headlong down the violent Stream,
The Mighty perish, like a Dream!
Sad Devastation! Swift and wide!
Thus blooms at Morn, the Meadows Pride,
------Verse VI
At Morn, in lusty Verdure gay,
At Eve, the Sickle’s hapless Prey
A wide-extended Ruin lies
On the bare Waste, and with’ring dies.
------Verse VII
O’er-whelm’d with Terror and Amaze,
We fee thy Wrath, around us, blaze.
Consum’d by thine avenging Ire
With copious Death our Hosts expire.
------Verse VIII
Thy Face, by its own Beams, descries
All our conceal’d Iniquities
Stern Justice every Crime arraigns;
And lays of each its Load of Pains.
------Verse IX
All our sad Days, thy Frowns we mourn;
Sickly, and weak, with Sorrow worn;
And mounting to our Noon a-pace,
And quickly finishing the Race,
The Measure of our Years is run,
Spent like a Tale.
------Verse X
------------------------The deathless Sun
Scarce seventy Springs renews his round,
Ere w lie mould’ring in the Ground:
Or should the vig’rous and the strong
Ten winters more drag Life along,
‘Tis a Reprieve, devoid of Rest,
Harrass’d with Toils, with Fears opprest,
And in our Strength cut off at last,
We vanish: thus a sudden Blast,
When fatal Shears the Fleece divide,
Whirls out of fight the falling Pride.
------Verse XI
Dread Sov’reign when thy Vengeance glows,
Who its full Force and Fury knows?
Great as our Fears, and unconfin’d
As thy own vast Almighty Mind.
------Verse XII
Make us, O make us, Father wise
To mark the Moment, as it flies,
Keep the small Sum of Life in view
And, whither Wisdom leads, pursue.
------Verse XIII
Return, offended Pow’r, we pray,
How long ———? O torturing Delay!
Pity the Pains thy Servants feel,
At length the stern Decree repeal.
Bid the auspicious Morning smile,
That finishes our Years of Toil.
------Verse XIV
Let Mercy then prepare a Feast,
And let our Nation be the Guest:
Till in full Tides our Joys arise,
Our Acclamations rend the Skies;
------Verse XV
Till in full Tides our Joy o’erflows,
Lasting and great, as now , our Woes.
------Verse XVI
Before our steps, thy Pow’r display,
With Wonders mark the shining Way:
O let thy Patronage Divine
Diffuse a Glory round our Line,
------Verse XVII
Thy Patronage Divine proclaim,
Thro’ ev’ry Land our honour’d Name.
Secure of thy Almighty Aid,
On that Eternal Basis laid,
May all our Plans of Conquest stand,
And all the Labours of our Hand.

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

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner*

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is a Chicago poet with seven collections to her name. She is also an influential editor — serving first as poetry editor for The Cresset, then for First Things, and finally for The Christian Century — a role she is still fulfilling. She is Professor of English Emerita at Wheaton College, where she also served as Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies.

Her new poetry book is a unique collection — a partnership, really, between Baumgertner and the Romanian sculptor Liviu Mocan. The sculptures, paired throughout the book with Baumgaerner’s poems, clearly stand on their own, and the poems work independently of the images. Even so, when they are considered together the experience is enriched.

Liviu says, “"When my hands touch the marble or the granite or the wood… I touch God's hands. God's hands are there waiting for me… This is how, resculpting His sculptures, I understand, day by day, how inadequate I am. I am a sculptor, I am a sculpture."

Jill says, “We want our book to tell the story that begins in radiance and beauty, progressed through sin to the fall, and leads to revelation and redemption through the vast and tender love of Christ.” This is, in my view, what they have accomplished.

The new book The Shapes are Real (Cascade Books, 2025) is indeed a partnership — and I am privileged to have served as editor. Philip Yancey wrote an introduction to the work of Liviu Mocan for the book, with an afterword by myself, entitled "Polishing Mirrors For Heaven" which also appears in the McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry. The following poem is from The Shapes are Real.

The book that reads you
------brass
------120 x 60 x 30 cm

sees you; you standing there
trying to read its opaque pages;
stiff, unbendable they seem
yet stacked with abundance
of breath between leaves and brass
that seem almost flexible..

It eyes you. Over and over
through its hieroglyphs, the tiny eyes
see all that you are, all that you
should be, all that you will be.
They are not meaning―but point
to meaning, harbingers, reflectors,

like the light from the moon―
not sun but sunlight still―
reflected yet substantial,
until the morning erases
dark illuminations and unveils
glory―
revelation the patina

covering sheen in the skin
of mercy.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Jill Peláez Baumgaertner: first post, second post, third post.

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

Boris Pasternak*

Boris Pasternak (1890—1960) is a Russian poet, whose father was a painter who taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and whose mother was a concert pianist.

His poetry collections include My Sister, Life (1922), Second Birth (1932), and Selected Poems (1946). Pasternak is the author of just one novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), for which he won the Nobel Prize.

At the time the Soviet government pressured him into rejecting the award. In a 1958 article interpreting these events, Time Magazine reported, “Pasternak wrote his novel Doctor Zhivago out of a passionate Christian conviction that salvation is possible only through the individual human spirit.” In Israel the novel was criticized as assimilationist, because Pasternak was in favour of his fellow-Jews converting to Christian faith.

After World War II, a series of his Christian poems on Easter themes, were said to have been written as a form of protest against communism.

The following poem draws an unlikely parallel betweeen an actor in a Shakespearean play and Christ fulfilling the role set out for him.

Hamlet

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba Father,
Everything is possible to Thee.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.

But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Boris Pasternak: first post.

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

William Cullen Bryant*

William Cullen Bryant (1794—1878) is one of the most significant poets in early American history. He studied law privately and was admitted to the bar when he was 21years of age. His dislike of the profession led him and his wife to move to New York in 1829 where he became the editor of the New York Review, and shortly thereafter became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post; he continued in that role for the rest of his life.

His poetry collections include Thanatopsis (1817), A Forest Hymn (1824), and Poems (1839). He is known as an American Romantic for his nature poetry, being significantly influenced by William Wordsworth.

Under the influence of his father, Bryant had started shifting toward Unitarian belief away from the Calvinism of his childhood. In his blank verse poem “A Forest Hymn,” however, he demonstrated a return toward Christian orthodoxy — seeing nature as the most suited place for communion with God.

The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, in Massachusetts, is a National Historic Landmark. It is located on a hillside overlooking the Westfield River Valley, on the site of the original Cummington community which was founded in 1762.

The Battle-Field

Once this soft turf, this rivulet's sands,
Were trampled by a hurrying crowd,
And fiery hearts and armed hands
Encountered in the battle-cloud.

Ah! never shall the land forget
How gushed the life-blood of her brave, —
Gushed, warm with hope and courage yet,
Upon the soil they fought to save.

Now all is calm and fresh and still;
Alone the chirp of flittering bird,
And talk of children on the hill,
And bell of wandering kine, are heard.

No solemn host goes trailing by
The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain;
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
O, be it never heard again!

Soon rested those who fought; but thou
Who minglest in the harder strife
For truths which men receive not now,
Thy warfare only ends with life.

A friendless warfare! lingering long
Through weary day and weary year;
A wild and many-weaponed throng
Hang on thy front and flank and rear.

Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,
And blench not at thy chosen lot;
The timid good may stand aloof,
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
The sage may frown, — yet faint thou not.

Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,
The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;
For with thy side shall dwell, at last,
The victory of endurance born.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, —
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers.

Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,
When they who helped thee flee in fear,
Die full of hope and manly trust,
Like those who fell in battle here!

Another hand thy sword shall wield,
Another hand the standard wave,
Till from the trumpet's mouth is pealed
The blast of triumph o'er thy grave

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about William Cullen Bryant: first post.

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

Allen Tate*

Allen Tate (1899—1979) is a Southern writer, born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University, where his roommate was Robbert Penn Warren. Rather than identifying primarily as an American, he saw himself as a Southerner — holding traditional agrarian values which reflect artistic beauty, rather than adopting Yankee industrialism and materialism.

He was not naïve to the sins of the South — first among these being bigotry and slavery — nor was he seeking to turn back towards an idealized past. He wrote, “A society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, secularize itself.” He was essentially a critic of American culture.

His poetry collections include Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), The Winter Sea (1944), and Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible (1950), His Collected Poems appeared in 1970.

Tate was poetry editor at Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1947, and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement. He converted publicly to Roman Catholicism in 1950.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an after-glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize—
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Allen Tate: first post.

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

Chad Walsh*

Chad Walsh (1914—1991) wrote six poetry collections, and several other books. He served as an English professor for more than thirty years at Beloit College in Wisconsin. His name comes up frequently these days, as Beloit College has named a poetry prize in his honour, as well as the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series from Beloit Poetry Journal. His anthology Today’s Poems: American and British Poetry since the 1930s was published in 1964.

He is also remembered by C.S. Lewis devotees. It’s hard to look into Walsh without being swamped by information about him in relation to Lewis. It was through reading Lewis — particularly the novel Perelandra — that he was first drawn to faith. Walsh had first written an article about Lewis in The Atlantic Monthly, and then travelled to Oxford to interview him, in preparation for his book C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (first published in 1949, and recently republished by Wipf & Stock in 2008). This book led to the growing popularity of Lewis in the US, which had already started in the UK.

A Quintina Of Crosses

Beyond, beneath, within, wherever blood,
If there were blood, flows with the pulse of love,
Where God’s circle and all orbits cross,
Through the black space of death to baby life
Came God, planting the secret genes of God.

By the permission of a maiden’s love,
Love came upon the seeds of words, broke blood,
And howled into the Palestine of life,
A baby roiled by memories of God.
Sometimes he smiled, sometimes the child was cross.

Often at night he dreamed a dream of God
And was the dream he dreamed. Often across
The lily fields he raged and lived their life,
And Heaven’s poison festered in his blood,
Loosing the passion of unthinkable love.

But mostly, though, he lived a prentice’s life
Until a singing in the surge of blood,
Making a chorus of the genes of God,
Flailed him into the tempest of a love
That lashed the North Star and the Southern Cross.

His neighbors smelled an alien in his blood,
A secret enemy and double life;
He was a mutant on an obscene cross
Outraging decency with naked love.
He stripped the last rags from a proper God.

The life of God must blood this cross for love.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Chad Walsh: first post.

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