When Poets Pray

Two dozen select prayer poems to learn from and live withPoetry 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