I love poems that stitch together memories from opposite ends of a lifetime, connecting them to our collective story in surprising ways. This poem feels dreamlike in its skill at just this kind of stitchwork. How simple Stelmach makes it look: take a phrase from poetry (commonly, arbitrarily) held as the most beautiful, and test…

Grief is a state of being that almost defies articulation. When you’re in it, it consumes and seems present in everything. Marjorie Stelmach focuses the lens of this poem on small scenes from the natural world—frames at once ordinary and suffused with loss, as befits the claustrophobia of mourning. The speaker here admits to wanting…

Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. I like a poem to surprise me, and Marjorie Stelmach’s “Canticle of Want” (Image issue 86)  is full of the unexpected. Recently I’ve been praying St. Francis’s famous “Canticle”: “All praise be…