Paraclete Poetry

Before In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's Memoir, Paul Quenon gave us Unquiet Vigil What might briefly tumble through a monks mind, or be hard chiseled over a span of years, what might be gleaned while ranging high along the Kentucky knobs, or what quietly emerges while sitting in the dark before dawn-these are the inner and outer landscapes of the religious poems found in Unquiet Vigil. From nocturnal Vigils to close listening to the liturgy of crickets, these are litanies of love and life, work, patience, and prayer. These poems are collected from over two decades of writing, and seasoned with the savor of five decades of living a monastic life.

This collection of poems engages in new and animating ways with one of the profoundest texts of our past, the Book of Psalms. These poems are Clarke's response to his experience of reading the Psalter through once every month according to Cranmer's divisions in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

SAID's 99 Psalms are poems of praise and lament, of questioning and wondering. In the tradition of the Hebrew psalmist, they find their voice in exile, in this case one that is both existential and geographical. His decision to include 99 in this collection recalls the ancient Muslim tradition that ascribes 99 names to Allah, though the "lord"whom this psalmist addresses is not bounded by this or any other religious tradition. As psalms that turn to the "lord" with a lover's vulnerability, they avoid every trace of sentimentality. Rather, they seek to open us to the mystery of human life, warning us of the difficulties we face in our attempts to live peaceably together in the midst of our differences.

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.

Margaret B. Ingraham's collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to "taste and see" – and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives. "What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the 'secret places of my brokenness.' It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith." -Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming.

Anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase, draws our attention in new ways to the repeated term, and can lead us to moments of epiphany. In Eucharistic settings, anaphora also indicates the specific liturgical moment when the bread and wine are consecrated, becoming what the Eastern Church calls "the Holy Mysteries." Cairns' use of anaphora invites us to see words as doing more than naming, more than serving as arrows pointing to prior substance, but acquiring substance of their own.

The poems in Flying Yellow cry out for the day just out of reach, the day which unaccountably may in a moment or a season let down a joyful light into the obscurity of human trial. A hopeful belief in heaven and the end of suffering colors these profoundly spiritual, often uneasy, poems. Carried by musical currents that shape her work, Rhodes ventures into what she calls "the good dark stuff" of experience-good because the dark is where Christ went, willingly, to take it captive. Whether probing the meaning of her own personal traumas or those of historical figures like Mary Rowlandson and Dorothy Bradford; whether peeling back layers of habitual sight to see the natural world of robins and ghost crabs and shorelines more truly, she brings the reader alongside in each surprising encounter to see the possibilities of light.

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.

Sonnets are familiar to us, but not relevant. What do they have to do with our fast-paced, tech-driven, ever-shrinking contemporary world? But what if the sonnet-invented 700 years ago-could come back like a cat with nine lives? A sonnet in the twenty-first century might serve as a sacramental form, calling us from our work-mad lives to quietness and reflection. In Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking, Jeanne Murray Walker invites the reader to join her on a journey told in 58 colloquial sonnets, beginning in the slangy streets of New York and ending in the holiness of silence and praise. Stops on the journey include reflections on death and grief, but also praise for a migrating butterfly, a knock on the door, the astonishing ocean. This book is designed to be used as a devotional and read slowly; to be both a book of poetry and a spiritual companion.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2020 Paraclete Poetry Prize, Litany of Flights is a luminous examination of the journey of the soul, from moments of loss to moments of incandescent transformation. These poems remind us to behold the extraordinary in the ordinary, and that the secret workings of the divine occur even through the difficult: "the painful paring of your hollow bones has made you light." Drawing on the beauty of the natural world, the devastating effects of drought and wildfires, tender moments of daily experience, and lessons of the saints, the poet creates a landscape of light and darkness, with unexpected turns into divine presence and absence. Through a spiral of red-tailed hawks, the nest of a mourning dove, the parting of waters, and the ripeness of a persimmon, this shimmering collection invites the reader to singular and transfiguring flight. Litany of Flights (from the forthcoming collection) First, the winged movement, steady, forward. Scrub jays in flitting progress, hawks in predator glide, a ringing up, a knife-sharp slope down. Second, the effortless type, wind-splayed, motionless pinions in thermal recline, as the Psalmist says, blessings breeze his love even in sleep. Third, the hungry, against the gale, the destination singular and the sun dipping crimson. Fourth, the metallic, business or pleasure. Fifth, the whirring kind, all hummingbird. A picnic, apples and chocolate in the garden with roses, both flower and child. You miss it when it's gone. Sixth, a baffling flight of stairs, winding upward, passage and yet vehicle, spiraling to unseen landings-hope courses in the kaleidoscopic lights. Seventh, soar to the sun. Eighth, melt in bitter hubris. You know the story. Ninth, escape. A flight out of Egypt, a path through the sea cleared by divine hand. The times you ran, the times you were left behind in lament. Tenth, only rotting in the belly of a whale tames your stubborn turn from Nineveh. Eleventh, flights of despair and of yearning, two sides of one letting go, hard-earned release back into the wild, unbound by expectation, featherlike. Twelfth, in a moment, caught up high by the Beloved, the one making all things work together, wings, body, arch, air-caught up, like the Shulamite bride, to regions beyond aeronautical wisdom, transported in joy. See, he says, the painful paring of your hollow bones has made you light.

The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet's time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text. No stranger to poetry, Paintner's bestselling spirituality titles have often included poems. In this first exclusively poetic collection, she writes with a contemplative heart about kinship with nature, ancestral connections, intimacy, the landscape, the unfolding nature of time, and Christian mystics. It can be read for reflection to spark the heart and to offer solace and inspiration in difficult times. Breath This breathing in is a miracle, this breathing out, release, this breathing in a welcome to the unseen gifts which sustain me each moment, this breathing out a sweet sigh, a bow to my mortality, this breathing in a holy yes to life, this breathing out a sacred no to all that causes me to clench and grasp, this breathing in is a revelation, this breathing out, freedom.

"I think that Phyllis was a poet first and foremost, before anything else. Here she has attentively gathered all of the poems she wished to preserve from the last half century. A handful of them were written in the last few years. This book should surprise a lot of people. It honestly leaves me breathless." -Jon M. Sweeney, editor of Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings (Orbis), and author of the biography, Phyllis Tickle (forthcoming)

From Saint Paul to Julian of Norwich, Scott Cairns has lovingly examined, pressed for the revelation, and set in verse the most memorable, beautiful sayings of the fathers and mothers of Christianity. The startling result is a fresh encounter of ancient wisdom and provocation. These poems are unified in a common claim that Love is the most compelling name of God and the most apt attribute of the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being. In that spirit Cairns offers "a mere taste of the bountiful feast that awaits any who would pursue a life of faith and prayer equipped with both the holy Scriptures and the holy tradition that surrounds them."

"The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it." –Simone Weil "Like most people I, too, have been blindsided by personal grief now and again over the years. And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now. For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a difficult essay, more like what we used to call an assay, really-an earnest inquiry. I am thinking of it just now as a study in suffering, by which I hope to find some sense in affliction, hoping-just as I have come to hope about experience in general-to make something of it." –from the book Is there meaning in our afflictions? With the thoughtfulness of a pilgrim and the prose of a poet, Scott Cairns takes us on a soul-baring journey through "the puzzlement of our afflictions." Probing ancient Christian wisdom for revelation in his own pain, Cairns challenges us toward a radical revision of the full meaning and breadth of human suffering. Clear-eyed and unsparingly honest, this new addition to the literature of suffering is reminiscent of The Year of Magical Thinking as well as the works of C. S. Lewis. Cairns points us toward hope in the seasons of our afflictions, because "in those trials in our lives that we do not choose but press through-a stillness, a calm, and a hope become available to us."

Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor is a collection of 101 sonnets that channel the voice of celebrated fiction writer, Flannery O'Connor. In these poems, poet and scholar Angela Alaimo O'Donnell imagines the rich interior life Flannery lived during the last fourteen years of her life in rural Georgia on her family's farm named "Andalusia." Each poem begins with an epigraph taken from O'Connor's essays, stories, or letters; the poet then plumbs Flannery's thoughts and the poignant circumstances behind them, welcoming the reader into O'Connor's private world. Together the poems tell the story of a brilliant young woman who enjoyed a bright and promising childhood, was struck with lupus just as her writing career hit its stride, and was forced to return home and live out her days in exile, far from the literary world she loved. By turns tragic and comic, the poems in Andalusian Hours explore Flannery's loves and losses, her complex relationship with her mother, her battle with her illness and disability, and her passion for her writing. The poems mark time in keeping with the liturgical hours O'Connor herself honored in her prayer life and in her quasi-monastic devotion to her vocation and to the home she learned to love, Andalusia.

Learning about the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash, a rabbinic form of textual interpretation that seeks and imagines answers to unanswerable questions, felt to Amy Bornman like a poetic invitation to re-engage with the Bible in a new way. There is a Future: A Year of Daily Midrash – an award-winner in the Paraclete Poetry Prize competition – grew from a yearlong project to read the Bible daily, and write daily midrashic poems in response to the readings-to honor the text by wondering about, and struggling with, it. By engaging particular passages of scripture across the Old and New Testaments directly, these poems imagine new dimensions of the text, and make vivid connections to the world as it is now and to the author's own life-emerging at year's end with new hope in a future that at times feels impossible, as the days pile on days and the text's enduring questions continue to ring.

Featured in "The Millions" - A year in Reading, Nick Ripatrazone."Each year I read more books than I can possibly review - here are 5 of the finest and most memorable of that bunch. They are worth your money, your time, and your attention. A book of poems that fictionalizes the life of Trappist monk Charles de Foucauld. Beautiful verse, full of pieces like "The Pangs of Wanting:" "I deliver my body to the church, / though I cannot imagine what penance might relieve / these pangs of wanting." Later: "I take first communion…My tongue licks up the bread: a whisper / of paper on my teeth…His torn body in my stomach, / his blood in my spit, I almost vomit; I almost sing." More collections about God like this one would be very welcomed."-Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions Charles of the Desert is a novel-in-verse accompanying Charles de Foucauld, hermit and writer of "The Prayer of Abandonment," as he explores and adapts desert spirituality, monasticism, and contemplative prayer. Charles is an unusual and compelling figure and Charles of the Desert is unusual and compelling as well -- different from nonfiction books which focus on instructing in or explaining these subjects. It also explores Charles' profound respect for Muslims, his pioneering efforts at interfaith dialogue, and his commitment to live among Muslims as a "universal brother" known for his compassion and solidarity. Born in 1858 to a family of French aristocrats, Charles was torn between his ambition to do great things and his desire for the hidden life, between public service and private prayer. Charles of the Desert uses elements of fiction and poetry to follow him to Morocco, Syria, Israel, and Algeria, as he becomes a cavalry officer, explorer, geographer, pilgrim, Trappist monk, priest, abolitionist, translator, folklorist, hermit, fort-builder, and martyr. Throughout these travels and transformations, Charles searched for a vocation that would reflect his convictions and his experience of God. In his last fifteen years, he settled in a remote part of the Sahara, and focused on self-denial, contemplation, and charity. He claimed the nomadic Tuareg as his brothers, the desert as his earthly home.

Although the literary form is poetry, this is a book about the spiritual life. Think of it as an armchair visit to a monastery. Focused around monastic themes, it speaks to the spiritual seeker and curious bystander alike by presenting a range of spiritual experiences in accessible language. The poems are grouped according to a monastic logic. A section on visits to monasteries is followed by poems on questions of vocation or spiritual calling that such visits often raise. Then the reader will follow the horarium, or monastic day, and encounter some fruit of lectio divina, the practice of prayerful reading of scripture. The poems on interior prayer will speak to contemplatives in any religious tradition. The collection closes by exploring the experience of anchorites and solitaries.

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.

In this collection, poet Sarah Law presents lucid, lyrical reflections on the much-loved saint, Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97), whose life and writing has been an inspiration to so many people. For Sarah Law, there is something about Thérèse that catches at the heart, and her poems flow from that sense of friendship and tenderness with her subject. Many of the poems meditate on events, large and small, in Thérèse's brief but spiritually significant life. The first section explores her childhood, and the second, her nine precious years as a Carmelite nun; years of both sweetness and suffering. Several poems are inspired by well-known photographs of Thérèse, some of which are included in this volume. A final section considers Thérèse's legacy, as her 'little way' of confidence and love became known throughout the world. Each poem may be read as an individual reflection, and as part of the larger biographical sequence.

A new collection from one of our favorite poets. Fourteen "Idiot Psalms," surrounded by dozens of other poems, make this his most challenging collection yet. "Idiot Psalm 1" O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind-while apparently aloof-allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will.

Scott Cairns has carefully preserved every poem he's ever published that he cares to preserve. He's also added previously unpublished work, spanning three decades. A careful introduction by Gregory Wolfe and tribute preface by Richard Howard make this the ultimate collection of Cairns' work.

What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poet's view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the "end times," but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. This is not prophecy as foretelling, but forth-telling: telling us the truths of our lives in the light of God's light. But rather than escape into some safe, heavenly realm, the poems return to our homes and meet us in the form of our neighbors, persecuted believers, and in shopping malls with vivid, edged-up language and the authority to believe and doubt at once.

At the core of this collection are 30 poems inspired by the stories of kinship between saints and animals. They come mostly from the early Christian desert and Celtic traditions, but also feature later medieval saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Julian of Norwich. These stories point to a reverence for a different way of knowing and being in the world, one our world is hungry for. Each poem in this collection is meant to be a doorway to intimacy with our inner wilderness, a call to sit and be present to what we discover beyond the borders of our neatly controlled worlds.

The Chance of Home Somewhere there must be where no one wonders whether you belong… So begins the title poem of this remarkable collection from a popular poet and scholar of mysticism. These poems remind us that "home" shapes us, not as a particular place; home is a way of being in this world, for us and for the creatures with whom we share it. It finds expression in the inner light that carries us through dark seasons and in what inspires us to risk life in the face of death. Home comes to us in the unexpected glimpses we sometimes have of a wholeness resonant enough to hold us amid fragments. Many of these poems come from a long looking at the familiar and the ordinary, a patient listening for traces of a beauty that might still save us-in the rhythms of a street musician plying his trade in a Lisbon subway, the radiance of birdsong interrupting the night's last hour, and the tolling of an old temple bell that "still sings in the silences." They ponder the resilience that lies at the heart of the natural world, as well as in our desire to thrive amid the distractions that pressure us in our lives. In an over-saturated age like ours, they invite us to linger at the edges of silence, and wonder what it means that we are not made for reason alone, but "for what song can bring of solace and delight."

"Steven has an Irish monk's attentiveness to the fragility, mystery, and hidden beauties of things." -Peter Leithart, First Things The book is a gathering together of all of Kenneth Steven's poems concerning the island of Iona through the years. These comprise poems that have been published in journals both at home and abroad, and broadcast on BBC Radio. A lengthy introduction tells the story of the forging of those first links with Iona, and those that have come through adult years. This is a book both for those who know and love the island, and for those who may yearn to visit but have not yet had the chance. It's essentially a love song to a precious and an extraordinary place that has been the author's spiritual home from earliest childhood days.

"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