When Poets Pray, Hardcover

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 instruc tion. 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

Marilyn McEntyre is the award-winning author of several books on language and faith, including What's in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause (winner of a Christianity Today 2015 book award in spirituality); Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts; Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice; and Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.