More on: Poetry

Among John Poch’s many skills as a poet is his ability to craft a long narrative poem and bring it off brilliantly. Narrative has long been out of style in modern poetry, much as it has been in visual art. The idea in both forms has been that narrative belongs to prose, and that poetry…

Don’t look for Luci Shaw lingering atop some contemplative mountaintop. She’s just as likely to be flinging herself off it. Poet, spiritual essayist, bungee jumper, world traveler, and photographer, she comes by her words of wisdom by pondering on the go. In short, she’s that rarest of rare birds, someone who finds a way to…

Nicholas Samaras reminds us of the British sculptor who fills empty rooms with plaster (or some liquid that turns solid) and then exhibits the shapes of the empty space. Instead of seeing the boundaries and edges of things we see the space between—the space in which we live and move and have our being. Poems…

The poet Donald Revell has written of G.C. Waldrep’s poetry: “Christopher Smart and Hart Crane applaud these poems in Heaven because the Earth of these poems is true.” That’s it exactly: the underlying tension that drives Waldrep’s poems is their earthy mysticism. As in his poetry, so in his life: Waldrep spent many years living…

When a poem called “Homage to Bosch” by Daniel Tobin arrived at the Image editorial offices ten years ago, we instantly knew that we were in the presence of a major talent. (We’re happy to say that it became the lead poem in Tobin’s collection, Double Life, from LSU Press.) “Homage” took on one of…

John Leax—“Jack” to anyone who knows him—is a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose writing has many moods, from irony so dry you could towel off with it to a deep, almost Franciscan sense of nature as guide to the soul. Whether he is writing about being out for a walk in the hills of…

Maurya Simon’s poetry explores the mysterious, elusive intersection where the sacred and profane meet. It’s a difficult place to render truthfully, but by paying meticulous attention to the tangible world of small gestures and fleeting experiences, she is somehow able to capture grace—or at least register its passage. Like the deep underground tanks of liquid…

It’s often been said that poetry and prayer are intimately related to each other, that they are, indeed, analogous. Both are forms of consecrated speech, language intensified, shaped, and offered up. The disciplines of mind and heart needed to progress in these two forms of expression are also analogous: both require a deeper appreciation of the…

Dick Allen has long been at the center of the movement known as Expansive Poetry. While it may not be as catchy as, say, “Beat,” the word “expansive” has all the right connotations: in particular, a widening of vision and spirit. The Expansivists reacted against the narrowly autobiographical and confessional nature of much late-twentieth century…

Diane Glancy is a Christian writer of German and Native American extraction. She explains her writing by pointing out that she works in the in-between: between genres, identities, systems of belief. Her work reminds us a great deal of Richard Rodriguez’s recent book Brown, in which he praises mixture—the movement of the distinct into the…