When Poets Pray

Two dozen select prayer poems to learn from and live with

Poetry and prayer are closely related. We often look to poets to give language to our deepest hopes, fears, losses-and prayers. Poets slow us down. They teach us to stop and go in before we go on. They play at the edges of mystery, holding a tension between line and sentence, between sense and reason, between the transcendent and the deeply, comfortingly familiar.

When Poets Pray contains thoughtful meditations by Marilyn McEntyre on choice poems/prayers and poems about prayer. Her beautifully written reflections are contemplative exercises, not scholarly analyses, meant more as invitation than instruction. Here McEntyre shares gifts that she herself has received from poets who pray, or who reflect on prayer, believing that they have other gifts to offer readers seeking spiritual companionship along our pilgrim way.

POETS DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOK

Hildegard of Bingen

Lucille Clifton

Walter Chalmers Smith

Robert Frost

Wendell Berry

Joy Harjo

John Donne

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Said

Marilyn McEntyre

George Herbert
Thomas Merton

Denise Levertov

Scott Cairns

Mary Oliver

Marin Sorescu

T. S. Eliot

Richard Wilbur

Francisco X. Alarcon

Anna Kamienska

Michael Chitwood

Psalm 139:1-12