More on: Luci Shaw

The trees of evening are filled, a sieve of leaves and small birds, the resident choir offering an evening orison of twitter. But look! high on the power line a singular sentinel robin conducts the evening’s benediction of western light glittering across the bay, between the islands, all the way to Canada.     Luci…

Summer already fading, out of the question. Light / arrives at an oblique angle. Scatters of rain. Yet here / we are, alive and attentive

To be a poet you must write
more than you know

O Listener, You know how pleased I can be with the sounds of my own words. But sometimes a prayer comes out half chewed, like a tough crust that sticks in the teeth. Or spat out, the stone from a sour plum. What if my prayer is thin, rote, barren of belief? If so, remind…

Yield is spring’s withered apple blossom ———evolving into fall’s rosy fruit. Yield is the dry grass under our feet ———softening in dew, and summer drought abated ———-by a week of steady rain. It’s the snowmelt stream shaping itself ———-to the rocks in its path. Yield is when, besieged by a poem, you ———are taken hostage…

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage, including the soggy gray mess on the deck like an abandoned mattress that has lost its inner spring. For the gurgle of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when…

Yes, a nameless quietness fills the frontiers within which my disgrace cries out. Maybe that’s why I tell my name to it when I wish no more we were together or when I tire of bearing myself. With my own hands maybe I’ll gather what’s left of the shiver of the aspen tree every evening.…

 Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Deed to the Light (University of Illinois Press) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. She is also an accomplished playwright, whose scripts have been performed in theaters…

Luci Shaw is attentive to balance, cultivating both an active engagement with the arts in culture and the solitude necessary to listen and catch at language. Her twelve acclaimed collections of poetry include What the Light Was Like, Harvesting Fog, and the forthcoming Slow Pleasures. Her nonfiction includes Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and…