George David Clark

George David Clark, born and raised in the South, is an associate professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He is also editor-in-chief at 32 Poems. His first poetry collection Reveille (Arkansas, 2015) won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and his latest collection is Newly Not Eternal (LSU, 2024). I had the privilege of meeting him in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was reading his poetry at an event with James Matthew Wilson, and John Poch.

His poetry is a musical experience, playing with rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia — sometimes cascading down the page in unexpected ways, that are more than mere measure. They are often fun to read, yet also engage with matters of significance — both relationally and spiritually.

The following poem originally appeared in The Hopkins Review. And is from Newly Not Eternal.

Ultrasound: Your Picture

-------------—Henry Thomas Clark, 10/7/14

We’ve framed an ultrasound
--------of you and Peter
holding hands
--------(or almost) in the womb,
your moon-bright arms
--------crossed in a black balloon
with week, and weights,
--------and heights in millimeters
penciled on the side.
--------We say it’s good
that he, at least, was with you
--------when you died,
that unlike us
--------you’ll never know the why
of being lonely
--------or what naked falsehood
feels like in one’s mind.
--------You see, it’s false

to say your death
--------was somehow grace. It’s grace
that spared Cain’s life
--------and later gave Eve other
sons, despite creation’s
--------wastes and faults.
I wish you could have known
--------love’s aftertastes.
I wish you’d had a chance
--------to hate your brother.

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.

Robert Cording*

Robert Cording is a Connecticut poet and professor emeritus at College of the Holy Cross where he taught for 38 years and became the Barrett Chair of English and Creative Writing. His tenth poetry collection In the Unwalled City (Slant, 2022) is an extended heart-breaking elegy for the untimely death of his adult son, Daniel. The book includes both poetry, and the essay of the book’s title. This twinned approach carries us intimately into the achingly honest experience of the poet.

Sydney Lea has said, “In a long and rich career, Robert Cording—indifferent to and transcendent of any vogue—has persisted in addressing what I can only and inadequately label matters of the spirit.” Lea refers to In the Unwalled City as Cording’s “most powerful work to date.”

The latest from Robert Cording is his What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems (Slant, 2026). I have the privilege of having worked with Bob on his earlier compilation — A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems (2013). Some of his poems will also be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology Unto Us a Child is Born: The Kingdom Poets Book of Christmas.

The following poem appeared in The Hudson Review, and is from In the Unwalled City.

At the Cemetery

After my son’s death, October leaves fell
on schedule. Wood smoke blew across a field.

I could find nothing to steer the days.
There was only the lifeless freedom

Of my own helplessness. My future seemed
unendurable, and yet it had to be endured.

Now I meet him at his grave.
A summer thunderstorm announces itself

in flashes and gusts of wind that rip leaves
from the maple tree beside his grave,

where, once again, I think of his birth.
Unplanned, at home, ten minutes from first pains

to his beig here. Just like that, I feel him
rushing into my hands, the weight of him.

I think of this so I do not lose my fatherhood.
Now, as trees bend south to north in the cemetery,

and the storm approaches, groaning as St. Paul
says the world groans like a mother in childbirth,

I groan: Lord, grant me this fatherhood of pain,
do not let grief be finished with me,

if only because it gives birth to my dead son
who is both not here, and not not here.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Robert Cording: 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.

Gerard Smyth*

Gerard Smyth is above all else, a Dublin poet. He was born in Dublin in 1951, and lives there still. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. In his most-recent collection The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026), he has several poems about his city featuring various Dublin poets and artists, including Thomas Kinsella, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, and Luke Kelly (founding member of the folk group The Dubliners).

Smyth’s enriching nostalgia also reflects on musical greats from his youth, tributes to the beat poets, and acknowledgements of foreign-language poets he admires, such as Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva.

This May, my wife and I had the privilege of having lunch with Gerard Smyth, and John F. Deane, at a Dublin pub called “The Downing Well”. There we exchanged our latest poetry collections and talked of poetry — both in Ireland and Canada.

The following poem is from The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026).

What the Young Saint Said

for John F Deane

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not Roman, not Greek,
or belonging only to pilgrim and conqueror
but the God of all things: the Judas Tree
and hornet’s nest, songthrush and garden slug.

Let God be God, not the bearer of so many names
or the judge who sits in the court of angels.
Let him not be the gatekeeper at the Gates of Wrath,
the tormenter of an innocent conscience.

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not the cause of holy wars
or one who sends his proxies to rob our mirth
but a God unbothered by heresies of dogma,
His presence heard in the singer’s voice,
sound of the orchestra, the iron gate
when it creaks, the bells on Paternoster Street.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Gerard Smyth: 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.

Patrick Kavanagh *

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is one of Ireland’s best-loved poets. He was born in County Monaghan, and published his first collection Ploughman and Other Poems (MacMillan) in 1936. In 1938 he briefly moved to London in search of literary work, finally settling in Dublin in 1939.

The folk group The Dubliners put Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road” to music (released in 1971). It has since been recorded many times, perhaps most-significantly on the Van Morrison and the Chieftains album Irish Heartbeat (Mercury Records, 1988). The Irish Times surveyed ‘the nation’s favourite poems’ in 2000, and ten of Kavanagh’s poems were in the first fifty.

Last month my wife and I visited Dublin for the first time, and I had the chance to seek out his sculpture on a bench along the Grand Canal. It is there to honour him for his poems “Canal Bank Walk” (which can be read here), and “Lines Written On a Seat On the Grand Canal. Dublin”.

On the back of my Penguin paperback of his Selected Poems, there’s a quote from Seamus Heaney regarding Kavanagh’s verse: “These poems… make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading… ‘You must change your life’”.

Ploughman

I turn the lea-green down
Gaily now,
And paint the meadow brown
With my plough.
I dream with silvery gull
And brazen crow.
A thing that is beautiful
I may know.
Tranquillity walks with me
And no care.
O, the quiet ecstasy
Like a prayer.
I find a star lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God!

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: 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.

A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. Even so, I heard him reading from his new collection last month — to a slight Saturday afternoon gathering of poetry lovers — at a tiny independent bookstore in London, Ontario — coincidentally called Little Wren Books.

His 24th poetry collection (depending on how you count) The Wren is a bit of a departure for him, in that this writer of longer, long-lined poems has deliberately created a book of short poems. More than sixty of the poems are shorter than sonnets, and some even shorter than haiku. What this offers, in my view, is a stripped-back collection that affords greater accessibility, and personal interaction with the poems. Novelist Michael Helm has said “In The Wren we meet essential poetry. The address is direct, the lines narrow, poems short. With subtle, turning movements the book offers arrival and furtherance, findings and beautiful modifications toward ideas and figures of rare exactness…”

The following poems are from The Wren (House of Anansi, 2026)

The Central Moment
(Homage to William Blake)

Troubles must come but woe to those
through whom they come. Better to have a millstone
fastened around your neck and be flung into the sea
than to disturb the faith of even one
of these little ones. So said angry love and peace—
what we might call the real real. And now
I am the little ones lolling, white and diseased
In ever-repeated questioning, and I am
the one who injected it into me. I am the neck
and the millstone. I am thrown from myself.
I am perpetually suffocating in the glory
or is it the horror of the shoreless sea.

Faithfulness

Time will run out on you,
they say. No. Time never
runs out.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the third Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: 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.

Nellie deVries

Nellie deVries is a Michigan poet, and the author of the new collection Japanese Garden: Four Seasons of Poems. (Resource Publications, 2026). Although she has authored three books for children through Baker Book House, this is her first poetry collection.

She was one of the participants in my festival circle group at the Festival of Faith & Writing back in 2014, and shared her poetry in my subsequent blog The 55 Project. Since then her poems have appeared in such publications as: Peninsula Poets, VietNow, Heart of Flesh, Exhale, and the anthologies Busy Griefs, Raw Towns; Michigan Roots, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

The following poem appeared in the anthology Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse edited by D.S. Martin (Poiema/Cascade, 2017).

Dwelling

2 Corinthians 5; 2 Timothy 4

In a Roman prison
the tentmaker looks at his hands,
calloused and needle-pricked,
and remembers a metaphor he had written:
...if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed,
we have a building from God, an eternal house
in heaven, not built by human hands.

He shudders at the chill autumn winds
and groans, longing to be clothed
wiht his heavenly dwelling.
With cold-gnarled fingers he grabs a quill
and writes, My dear son, I long to see you.
Bring my cloak, and my scrols, especially
the parchments. Come to me quickly.
Do your best to get here before winter.

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.

John Donne*

John Donne (1572―1631) is one of England’s most influential poets. In his early career Donne spent his inheritance on women and extensive travel, writing erotic poetry and satires. However, in his latter years he dedicated himself to being a priest and to writing poetry of the kingdom. He served as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 to 1631.

Donne is one of the two most significant poets, along with George Herbert, known as the Metaphysicals. For me these poets are of personal significance, as they have influenced me in my poetry for a long time. Most recently, my book The Role of the Moon features poems in conversation with these poets — including 19 poems inspired by each of John Donne’s 19 Holy Sonnets.

I say in the introduction to this new poetry book, “It is hardly a clear category, but Metaphysical Poets to me simply mean those who use metaphors ― sometimes elaborate, extensive metaphors known as conceits ― to talk about ideas outside of human sense perception. Because these poets were deeply dedicated to their Christian faith ― Herbert, Donne, and Traherne being Anglican priests ― much of their poetry expresses their wrestlings with God, and with their own weaknesses.”

Holy Sonnet VII

At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou'hadst seal'd my pardon with thy blood.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about John Donne: first post, second post, third 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.

Sarah Rossiter

Sarah Rossiter is a creatively versatile writer, publishing both poetry and fiction. She is the author of the novel The Human Season, (Little Brown), the short story collection, Beyond This Bitter Air, (Illinois University Press), and the poetry chapbook, Natural Life with No Parole, (Finishing Line Press).

After years of having poetry appear in various journals — including multiple appearances in The Christian Century — Sarah Rossiter has now authored the full-length poetry collection Body of the World, which has just appeared from Cascade Books, and the Poeima Poetry Series. I am honored to have worked with Sarah in bringing this book to the public.

She lives with her husband of over sixty years in Concord, Massachusetts — now a Boston suburb, but once home to such literary figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau.

Rossiter describes herself as a cradle Episcopalian and a spiritual director who’s been meeting with those on the Path for thirty years. She is the mother of four, grandmother of eleven.

The following poem is from Body of the World.

Half-Light

Waking to winter’s dawn,
room drained of color
except for neon numbers–
6:14– blinking on the bruise
of the bureau against a pale wall

while out the window
a world shrouded, everything,
all of it, wrapped in gauze:

like Lazarus, I think, when
Jesus, weeping, called him forth,
and he woke from death, blinded,
his body bound by strips of cloth
that, like a chrysalis dissolving,
fall away as he rises to stumble
through darkness, stunned,
not knowing where he’d been or
what comes next, until he merges
into sudden sun.

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.

Luci Shaw*

Luci Shaw (1928—2025) is a pioneer poet of true artistry and Christian faith. The author of eighteen poetry collections and several other books. She passed away on December 1st at age 96. She was a dear friend, and a significant influence on my life.

How can I express the gratitude I have for Luci? One of the earliest poems I ever had published was accepted by Luci Shaw for Radix. I remember how thrilled I was later when she wrote an endorsement for my first full-length poetry collection, Poiema (2008). Next, I was further affirmed by this excellent poet when she accepted me as her editor for her poetry collection Scape (2013), which appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series. Perhaps the greatest honour she gave, was to ask me to write an endorsement for her for her eighteenth poetry book, An Incremental Life (Paraclete, 2025). I am clearly the one honoured by being asked to do this. The following is my endorsement as it appears in that book.

“For decades I have sat at Luci Shaw’s feet, listening to her lyrical wisdom, her playful music, her spiritual insight, and her deep connectedness to the natural world. In The Incremental Life, Luci Shaw shares her metapoetics ― choosing ‘words like matches, / striking them to see what happens next.’ As a nonagenarian, she acknowledges her shrinking life, yet invites us even into this experience. Still she wrestles with faith, and says to God, ‘Come, now. Fill / the gaps, mend the widening cracks in my aging /soul. I’m moving in your direction, but I move / more slowly, see more dimly, require more daily.’ As always, though, Luci Shaw is as wide-eyed as a child. ‘My heart,’ she writes, ‘is ambushed by simple beauty.’”

The following poem is from her collection, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation (Eerdmans, 2006), and is one she has granted permission for me to use in a forthcoming Christmas poetry anthology which I am planning for 2026.

A Blessing for the New Baby

Lightly as a falling star, immense, may you
drop into the body of the pure young girl like a seed
into its furrow, entering your narrow home under the
shadow of Gabriel’s feathers. May your flesh shape itself
within her, swelling her with shame and glory. May her
belly grow round as a small planet, a bowl of golden fruit.

When you suck in your first breath, and your loud
cries echo through the cave. (Blessings on you, little howler!),
may Mary adorn you with tears and caresses like
ribbons, her face glowing, a moon among stars. At her
breasts may you drink the milk of mortality that transforms
you, even more, into one of your own creatures.

And now, as the night of this world folds you in its
brutal frost (the barnyard smell strong as sin), and as
Joseph, weary with unwelcome and relief, his hands
bloody from your birth, spreads his thin cloak around you
both, we doubly bless you, Baby as you are acquainted
for the first time, with our grief.

*This is the fifth Kingdom Poets post about Luci Shaw: 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.

Wendell Berry*

Wendell Berry is an essayist, novelist and poet who lives on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He is known for his environmentalism, and his agrarian values. His most recent poetry collection, Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023 is a follow-up to his book This Day in which he had gathered all of his Sabbath Poems to date from 1979 to 2012. Berry’s Sabbaths, according to Southern Review of Books, are “poems mostly written on Sunday walks in the woods as a spiritual or reflective exercise.”

He celebrated his 91st birthday on August 5th, and has been married to his wife Tanya since 1957. He expresses his belief in Sabbath rest, saying, “the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest.” This reminds me of Christ’s parable in Mark 4:17 where “whether [the farmer] sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”

Counterpoint Press suggests “With the publication of this new edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work.” I included five of Berry’s earlier Sabbath poems in the anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry, and see them as significant to the poetry of our times.

The following poem I suspect may have arisen from Berry’s meditations on Piero della Francesca's painting, "The Resurrection". It is from Another Day (Counterpoint, 2024).

Sabbaths 2020 VIII

Piero

A brushstroke,
another, another,
a day and a day,
and finally Christ
stands, risen
out of his grave,
as this witness
at last has seen.

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

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.

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.

Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan is a Singapore poet and translator whose second book bright sorrow has just appeared from Landmark Books. Born in Manhattan to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, educated at Cambridge and Yale, he was raised in Singapore and has returned there after his years at university. His first collection going home (Landmark Books, 2022). was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. Part of what he explores in that book is the sense of what home is when a single locale may or may not be the home one is going to.

He is Managing Editor for the poetry archive Poetry.sg. His poetry is widely published; I personally have selected his poems for Ekstasis, and for Poems For Ephesians, as well as for a forthcoming anthology of Christmas poems in the Poiema Poetry Series.

Jonathan Chan has said, “matters of faith are integral and inherent to my writing” — while Christian Wiman has said, “Jonathan Chan’s poems are distinctively musical, acutely observed, and existentially engaged at the deepest level. They are bracing to discover.”

The following poem is from bright sorrow.

eternity

after Marilynne Robinson

and so the old man said
eternity is a thing we have

no hope of understanding.
things happen the way

that they do. a note follows another
in a song. a song is itself and

not another. a song is a song
itself. eternity holds space for

all these songs. for a song is
like a life, resounding in a kind

of tune. lives are what they were
and have been. lives are not merely

every worst thing. a mother prays
for her scoundrel son to be taken

up into heaven. Lila thinks this
an injustice to the scoundrels

with no mothers. people try
to get by. people are good

by their own lights. people take
all the courage that they have

to be good. for in eternity,
to eternity, eternity is just

a thing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

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.

Cameron Brooks

Cameron Brooks is a South Dakota poet, who lives in Sioux Falls. He earned his MA in theological studies from Princeton Seminary, and more-recently an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University, where he had Scott Cairns, Jennifer Maier, and Mischa Willett as professors. He is representative of a new generation of Christian poets who captures the universal through the particularity of place and of his own experience.

His first poetry collection, Forbearance, has just appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. I am pleased to have been able to work with Cameron Brooks as his editor.

Bruce Beasley calls this new book: “a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, ‘gaunt silo[s]’ of South Dakota’s High Plains.” And says that “Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself…”

The following poem is from Forbearance.

The Mower and the Nun

The man who mows the ditch
between the strips of interstate
found it worthwhile to leave us
patches of wild sunflowers
every several miles.
Even at eighty-per-hour
you can't miss ‘em: sunny thumbprints
pressed against the paper
bag browns of late September.
I will never thank him.

And I will never thank the nun
I saw watering her brittle yard
with a hose—in full garb!
That strange religious habit
of the celibate salt of this dearth.
Doesn't she know October
is coming and November is coming
and December comes only to steal
and kill and destroy? She knows
life, life abundantly.

Posted with permission of the poet.

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.

Marjorie Maddox*

Marjorie Maddox is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, in Pennsylvania. To enumerate just some of her achievements, count the 17 collections of poetry she has published — awards received including the Yellowglen Prize, an Illumination Book Awards Medal, the Foley Poetry Prize, and several chapbook awards — as well as the more than 700 poems, stories, and essays she’s published in journals and anthologies.

Her new book Seeing Things (2025, Wildhouse Publishing) will appear on February 28th. Amid the advance praise for this poetry collection, Jeanne Murray Walker has said, “It’s surely one of the best books I have read this year.” It is a very personal book where Marjorie Maddox finds herself between her mother’s advancing dementia and her daughter’s depression, with troubling memories of her own.

The following poem is a tribute from one friend to another, both of whom are fine poets, one of whom died far too young of inflammatory breast cancer. I have had the privilege of editing poetry collections for both Marjorie Maddox (True, False, None of the Above) and Anya Krugovoy Silver (Second Bloom) as part of the Poiema Poetry Series. This poem first appeared in Presence, and is from Marjorie’s new book Seeing Things.

Photo with Bald Heads

— for Anya Krugovoy Silver and Noah Silver

Or nearly; the baby fuzz is hers,
compliments of the cancer we seldom speak,
though she does—loudly and often—but not now.
Instead, on this matte finish, she calmly cradles
the red-faced infant, his small mouth open,
life from the still-living pulsing.
His soft spot already
sprouts strands she’ll touch
and touch again. See
how she stares out at us
or at God, just this side of the pictureperfect
smile she owns
in the bright flash
of her dark room. See how
she embraces, with her
sleep-deprived, wideawake
eyes, much more
than the omniscient
one-eyed camera
could ever claim. Only she
can reveal her See
this is me there, here, now,
grabbing my own ever after,
the camera clicks and subtle shifts
that follow: her liturgy not of beginnings
or ends, but persistence, holy continuation
into our space of now, brimming
just so with this immortal moment of joy.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Marjorie Maddox: 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.

Richard Osler*

Richard Osler (1951—2024) is a Canadian poet who began his writing career as a journalist with The Financial Post newspaper in 1975, and through the ‘80s was a regular panellist on the weekly "Business Column" portion of the national CBC radio program, Morningside.

As a poet, Richard was one to primarily point to the work of others through such activities as his long-running blog Recovering Words, and one who dedicated his time to leading poetry writing workshops and poetry as prayer retreats. His first full-length collection Hyaena Season was published by Quattro Books in 2016.

One connection I had with Richard was selecting, and working with him on, one of his poems for the outdoor art exhibits of Imago’s project Crossings which appeared in downtown and midtown Toronto throughout Easter 2022. His last e-mail to me came less than a month before he was taken by cancer in late October. He said, “These last 16 weeks since diagnosis [have been] the most meaningful of my life.”

He says in a poem from his new book:
----Give death a face a voice directed me.
----My own face now wise with the news
----of death inside of me. If I walk
----to the mirror and look is it me I see
----or death now come out from hiding
----inside my face?

Richard died just hours after he had attended an online launch for his final poetry collection, What Holiness Will I Bring? (2024, Frontenac House). In describing Richard’s insistence on revealing to us this “art of knowing / and being known” Ilya Kaminsky said “This insistence is generosity. What do we learn? We learn to live passionately, intently, with a fire of clarifying search. We learn poetry is a spiritual discipline, the kind in which the world is our friend.”

Many years ago, Richard sent me a copy of his privately printed chapbook Not Yet (2006). Here, I will share one of the poems from that book.

Remnants

Faith is this day:
Waves gather up and fall.
Sun pours in from the east.
Tethered boats move
out on the bay. The breeze knows
my face. The brown dog belongs
to its stick, my throwing, the water
that holds them both up
and her sad moaning when I stop.

I have faith in this breathing
and writing and the crow’s black caw.
These geese left with three goslings
from April’s twelve. The smaller stick
chewed and now in pieces at my feet.
The volcano’s black stones
lost in a mountain’s last breath.
The driftwood logs left on the beach.
My own life, coming apart
into the smaller things —
this day
holding my faith in the promise
of another.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Richard Osler: 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.

John Leax*

John Leax (1943—2024), known to his friends as Jack, is one of the pioneers of contemporary poetry written from a place of deep evangelical faith. The first of his six poetry collections, Reaching into Silence, was published by Harold Shaw Publishers in 1974. He also wrote one novel Nightwatch (1989), and several books of nonfiction. His 1993 book Grace Is Where I Live was expanded and republished with Wordfarm in 2004.

Jack Leax was also a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in upstate New York from 1968 until 2009. He passed away from cancer on September 1st.

The following poem is from his poetry collection Remembering Jesus: Sonnets and Songs (2014, Poiema/Cascade). I am honoured to have worked with Jack as the editor for this, his final book.

Recognition

John 2:14-15
Luke 2:48

There was, I thought, something about the man
Familiar, an image pressed on the coin
Of memory. But slow, afraid, I’d join
The fallen under toppled tables, I ran.
I’m sure, now, I needn’t have. His harsh whip
Sought the rash of thieving profiteers
Hawking oxen. Sheep, and pigeons, their sneers
Mocking country pilgrims come to worship.

I crept back when breath returned. Around
Him stood the Pharisees. His zealousness
For the Father’s house brought back a scene. Years
Ago I watched a quiet boy confound
The elders. As then, I saw his brightness
Was a sword. His mother’s love would end in tears.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about John Leax: 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.

Mary of Nazareth

Mary is the earthly mother of Jesus, who by the power of the Holy Spirit, though she was still a virgin, conceived God’s own son. The story in Luke’s account begins with Zacharias — a man in the priestly line — being told by the angel Gabriel that he and his wife, Elizabeth, will have a child in their old age. This child was to be the one to go before the coming of the Christ to prepare the people for the coming of the Lord.

When Gabriel announces to Mary that she is to become the mother of the Messiah, he also reveals that her cousin Elizabeth is miraculously six-months-pregnant.

The following canticle is an exclamation of praise (here in the New King James Version) which was spoken by Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, whom she was visiting in the Judean hill country. It is known as “The Magnificat,” which is Latin for “magnifies” as spoken in the opening line.

The Magnificat

My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.

(For those who ponder, like I have —
----How did this navigate its way
----into Luke’s account?
— check out my poem “Magnificat” from my poetry collection Poiema.)

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926) is an Austrian poet born in Prague. Although he is not a Christian, he did receive an intensely Catholic upbringing through his mother. This provided him with Christian imagery and stories, which significantly influenced his concepts of the spiritual life as he created his own mythological landscape.

When Rike refers to God he has his own pantheistic ideas in mind — although for a reader with Christian understanding of who God is, the interpretation might often remain orthodox.

Rainer Maria Rilke is known for his lyrical intensity — particularly in his Duino Elegies which begins, Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic / orders? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed / in his stronger existence…

In my own poem “Response to Rilke” I have my angelic narrator reply,
----There are few angels---to firsthand hear your cries
--------for some circle the earth
----------------turning away terrors you’ve no knowledge of…
----& though I once was called---to oversee your sojourn
----it was never mine---to turn you left or right
---------------------------or hold you in my embrace…

So many translations of Rilke’s poems appear in journals, anthologies, books, and on the internet, including by such noteworthy poets as Seamus Heaney. Since, like most of you, I don’t speak German, I must content myself with English translations, comparing one with another, and hanging onto the versions that grip me most.

I have been arrested by Rilke’s poem “Autumn” (“Herbst” in German) from The Book of Images many times in various translations. The subtleties from one translation to another deepens my appreciation of the original poem.

Susan McLean translates the opening couplet as
----The leaves are falling, falling from on high,
----As if far gardens withered in the sky.

And Robert Klein Engler has the third line read:
----to teeter with the grace of letting go.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The following beautiful version is a translation by Charles L. Cingolani.

Autumn

The leaves fall, as from afar,
as if withered in heaven's remote gardens;
it is with reluctance that they fall.

And during the nights weighty earth falls
from all the stars into solitude.

All of us fall. This hand falls here.
And look at others: All of them fall.

But there is One, Who holds what falls
with infinite tenderness in His hands.

Even though this is my favourite translation, I appreciate some alternate ways certain lines are carried into English.

Edward Snow renders the final couplet as:
----And yet there is One who holds this falling
----with infinite softness in his hands.

And J.B. Leishman translates it:
----And yet there’s One whose gently-holding hands
----This universal falling can’t fall through.

Despite Rilke’s fragmented acceptance of a Biblical concept of God, his poem does draw us toward a beautiful truth.

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.

Luke Harvey

Luke Harvey is a poet who describes himself as “living in the interstate / between two worlds” — that is, in Chickamauga, Georgia, just ten miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee. He works as a high school teacher in that other world. He also writes for and works on the poetry editorial panel for The Rabbit Room.

Harvey’s debut poetry collection Let’s Call It Home has just appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. I am honoured to have worked with Luke in editing this fine book for publication.

The English poet Malcolm Guite has written of this new collection, “Time and again these poems do what poetry does best: they transfigure the familiar and so reveal something of its meaning: …from the mystery of the earthworm rising towards the rain, to the family who find that feeding a child pureed peas is an entirely sacramental act, in poem after poem Luke Harvey gives us a glimpse of what George Herbert called ‘Heaven in Ordinary’.”

The following poem is from Let’s Call It Home.

After the Murder

The crux of the matter is what to do.
with the body now crumbled

in your hands. Logic says dismember
it, scrubbing beneath your fingernails

to rinse away any condemning
evidence of having been at the scene

of the slaughter, then bury the axe.
Or maybe you play it cool, act

like it’s nothing new to hold a carcass
in your cupped palms, like really this

is something you do on a weekly basis,
nonchalant as a Sunday stroll. Of course,

you wouldn’t be here in the first place
if you were one to listen to logic,

so disregard that. You’re holding the flesh
and blood of another. This is no time for logic.

Pray for forgiveness and devour it,
wiping first one cheek, then the other.

Posted with permission of the poet.

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.