More on: Poetry

Lia Purpura writes with steely, unflinching precision about the things we often look away from—death, and specifically the body’s decay. In poems and essays, through irresistibly burnished language, she compels us to let our gaze linger, holding our attention until we can see a kind of beauty, order, and blessedness even in scenes of rot…

To adapt an old phrase to a new context: we have no hesitation in calling Jill Peláez Baumgaertner a “Renaissance woman.” Scholar, administrator, literary critic, and poet, Baumgaertner is a true servant of the word and the image. Whether she is penning a scholarly essay on the poetry of John Donne, or a feature article…

Pattiann Rogers is a poet of nature—but also a profoundly theological poet. “Everything I see of heaven,” she writes, “I know by the earth.” Hers is a theology grounded in the hard particulars of the natural world, an anagogic way of knowing that, as she demonstrates in a poem called “Whence and the Keeper,” finds…

The poems of Betsy Sholl reveal the habits and motions of an active human mind: the fluid unwinding of thought, the pushing forward into the space ahead, the dance of logic—sometimes stately, sometimes playful. Each measure of sound is delicately honed and flows purposefully into the next. Poems of intellect, history, and theology, her works…

Franz Wright’s poetry distills suffering, doubt, and desire into a stripped-down style that is both austere and hopeful. But a patient reading of his work reveals that Wright’s frank confessions of need and failure are anything but “confessional.” Rather, his short lines and plain diction set his own precarious consciousness against the larger canvas of…

Christian Wiman is a welcome voice in contemporary poetry. His is a gracious, impassioned intellect, full of both energy and gravity—and here is a broadly read writer who affirms the value of timeless religious questions. Wiman brings the drive and seriousness of his west Texas upbringing to his editorship of the venerable Poetry magazine, using…

In her poem “Parsonage with Two Maples” (published in Image #60), Terri Witek renews Emily Dickinson’s call to “tell it slant.” We sense that it is an autobiographical poem, yet it quickly becomes clear that this is not a work in the confessional mode: there is no “I” calling attention to itself on center stage.…

Richard Michelson is one of those rare writers who not only understands that comedy and tragedy are close neighbors but also enables you to feel that mysterious juxtaposition. Take his poem from the 20th Anniversary issue of Image, “Another Holocaust Poem.” As he sits writing a poem, Michelson is reflecting on his childhood and family…

To spend time in the poetry of Margaret Gibson is to be drawn into an especially vibrant kind of stillness. Gibson’s world is full of a remarkably rich quiet—a quiet you might even call inhabited: not the silence of a pristine meditation chamber, but the quiet of rain falling on a mossy roof, or a…

Poet Kathleen Housley is a sort of Dian Fossey of human language. In pursuit of its mysteries, she has gone out in language’s dark, misty forest and lived among it like a conservation biologist, with her clipboard and binoculars. To our great benefit, Housley is a passionate, meticulous student. In her poems, one encounters a…