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 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