Paraclete Poetry

Luci Shaw is now 90 years old. The author of more than 35 collections of poetry and creative non-fiction over the last five decades, she describes her dedication to this art as a burden to "speak into a culture that finds it hard to listen." This collection of new poems-all composed over the last two years-is in many ways the culmination of a stunning career. The joy and responsibility of the poet is to focus on particulars within the universe, finding fragments of meaning that speak to the imagination. Ordinary things may reveal the extraordinary for those willing to take time to investigate and ponder. In this fresh collection of poems, Luci Shaw practices the art of seeing, and then writing what she sees, realizing that beauty is often focused in the Eye of the Beholder. Eye of the Beholder is meant to awaken in readers awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary. They will find in this collection a focus for meditation and be excited into their own imaginative writing.

After 60 years at Gethsemani Abbey, Br. Paul follows up his recent memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, with a poetic collection that shows how to do just that – by writing poetry. Amounting to Nothing is both practical and metaphysical, a puzzling over the ultimate things of life, and a descending on the Benedictine ladder of humility to the earthly creatures surrounding a Kentucky monastery. This is less an exploration in self-knowledge than a forgetting of self in the wonders of everything. Quenon treads bare footed on the margins of mortality and immortality, with wit, thought, and hope.

This collection offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poet's creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs ̶ grief and the desire to honor those "saints" who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console as they do. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, "this far," and gestures to what lies beyond.

"Rejoice, readers, as you receive the generosity of Luci Shaw's 76 new grace-infused parable poems. Autobiography once more merges with theology as these poems illuminate in splendored natural detail how the seasons of creation parallel and explain the seasons of her life as a poet. Again and again, these poems shower us with glorious epiphanies from the natural world as it reflects God's generosity at work such as "spring's impossible news of green." These poems confirm that in poetry as in faith "ripeness is all." Like Wordsworth, Luci is celebrated for being a highly gifted landscape poet whose works are rich in imagery from the physical world-meadows filled with seeds, flowers, and also poems which are like "shoots" in Luci's writing life. Animals, too, great and small (beetles, cricket, and voles to bears and whales) play a major role in Luci's poetics of creation; God is likened to a great bear who leaves paw tracks for us to follow. In their deep faith and vibrant colors and designs, the poems in Generosity might be considered Luci's Book of Kells. We need to be like Luci's father who carried her poems in his briefcase to show his friends." -Philip C. Kolin, Author, Reaching Forever: Poems; Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus), University of Southern Mississippi

Rooted in the grit of urban Baltimore and the forests of rural Massachusetts, these poems remind us that life's tensions and polarities are energies we carry within ourselves. These are poems of witness and commentary, conversation and meditation. They offer moments of close looking, and of looking away; of loving, and of bungled attempts to be more loving. They call us to look long and hard- and generously -at our lives. Written with radiant honesty and fierce tenderness, they suggest a path of inner discovery where mystery awaits us in the ordinary.

Wing Over Wing clears a path in the midst of everyday life to reveal the holy-whether catching fireflies at night, waiting at a bus stop, or experiencing the death of a loved one. This collection of beautiful poems lives at the intersection of the sacred and the ordinary, from the swirling flight of birds to conversations with the homeless. Wing Over Wing brims with compassion. The reader will find comfort and sustenance, as well as surprise and laughter, in these pages.