When Poets Pray

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 professor of English at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California. She has written dozens of articles and reviews in such journals as The Washington Post, Theology Today, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Christianity Today. She is also the author of Dwelling in the Text and A Healing Art: Regeneration through Autobiography.