Luci Shaw

Review: An Incremental Life

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "An Incremental Life" by Luci Shaw

An Incremental Life, Luci Shaw. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640609792) 2025.

Summary: Poems celebrating the daily moments offering glimpses of joy, growth, insight, and the quiet presence of God.

There are an abundance of ordinary moments between the “life events” we post on social media profiles, and celebrate with family colleagues, and friends. Much of the substance of our lives is found in the ordinary. Noticed and meditated upon, these become a rich tapestry that we call a life. But it is also in these moments that growth in character, and increasing “God-likeness” occurs.

Luci Shaw’s latest collection of poetry, An Incremental Life invites the reader into Shaw’s own practice of noticing and meditating upon the “moments” or “increments in her life. Reading a poem aloud with one’s eggs at breakfast is “Nutriment” for the ears, the voice, and the mind. Polishing a napkin ring with the initials of her father recalls his embrace, smell, and love for God. A return visit to the Grand Canyon reminds her of the Colorado River’s once raging torrent, now reduced to a trickle by “our consumer generation.” In “Estuary,” Shaw and her husband visit a newly formed tidal estuary. Then she reflects on the tides that have poured in and out of their shared lives. She describes “our old eyes viewing a celestial transaction as if for the first time.”

Many of her poems are filled with observations from the natural world. In “Garden Work” she considers how garden work continues when her work for the day is done. Thus, it is a blessing which may fill our lives if we recognize and receive it. “Ambush of the Heart” captures how both simply beauties and unearthed memories may ambush our hearts with wonder. In “Refresh,” a barefoot walk in the grass becomes an immersive experience of the blessing of God.

Other poems mark passages of seasons and the advance of years. “Coda or End-of-Summer Blues” reflects on hoped-for summer plans unfulfilled, regrets failure in the vegetable garden and the life of prayer, rejoices in the flourishing of love and family, and God who ever waits for our attention. She likens herself in one poem to an old cardigan, somewhat threadbare. She acknowledges her want of vigor, sapped of energy by pain and her fights against it. Finally, she fastens it to the shoulder of God. Despite her vibrant faith, in “Mortality” she asks (as have many of us), “Tell me, how may I delay my dying?”

As in other collections, some of her poetry is on the making of poetry, including “How It Happens.” She writes of her aspiration to pen “Edible Words” “rinsing away/falsehood and injury.” She describes how “The New Poem” takes shape through writing and revision as she will “smooth stuttering rhythms.” And then comes time to “blow it a fond, farewell kiss.”

Shaw captures how, as we age, we may both live in the present moment, and re-live the events of our lives, bringing those increments together into a richer synthesis. Our failings and frailties, increasing with the years, may also bring increasing awareness of the presence of the One on whom we depend. And somehow, in all of this, there is the hope of incrementally growing into God’s purposes, even in the face of our own mortality.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Reversing Entropy

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment
Cover image of "Reversing Empathy" by Luci Shaw

Reversing Entropy, Luci Shaw. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640608702), 2024.

Summary: Poems that address the decay in the physical world and how human creativity and transcendent hope reverses entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics observes that the amount of disorder in any physical system will increase over time. Only the introduction of energy can counter the increase of disorder and decay. Luci Shaw, at 95, is a keen observer of the physical world as well as the changes we experience in our own bodies and much of this shows up in the poetry in this collection.

One of the delights is that Shaw observes what we often see only in passing. She celebrates the first star at night visible through her skylight. She notices the dance of the lichens. Many of her poems chronicle the drives she and her husband take. She observes the entropy of the autumn, the fall of gingko leaves, the single leaf pinned to the windshield.

Human creativity in music, the arts, writing and other ways help reverse the entropy in our human communities. Some of her poems share her creative process “when the words begin to arrive.” She likens poetry to laundering and describes filling the “fresh, clean page.”

Part three of the collection includes several exquisite poems on Mary and the incarnation, including one poem on “Mary’s sword.” Part four include more poems on the title theme. She captures, in “Energy Entropy” the dance between these two in all of our existence: “Pair the antonyms/energy and entropy,/unusual partners/twinned in the making of love,/to join with all the unmaking/and remaking within/the fluid universe.”

The title poem of the fifth part is “Love in a Time of Plague,’ and captures the healing of what was lost when we could unmask, and behold, and converse with each other. The sixth part deals with the ultimate expression of entropy, death. Vulnerably, she recounts both her brother’s failings, and of speaking and listening over the phone as he breathes his last, and the unfolding of grief. And here, she leans into the ultimate reversing of entropy, the Great Dance of heaven, the dawn of Light, the renewal of all that is only dimly foreshadowed in the creation and our own efforts to forestall entropy.

Shaw reminds us of the wonder of our lives in our world amid entropy’s relentless incursion. Her daily celebration of the quotidian beauties around us rolls entropy back, at least a bit. And her hope in the “deeper magic,” as C.S. Lewis would express it, stakes out a claim to the final reversal of entropy for which we all long. And what a gift to us that she wrote these poems around her 95th year!

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Angels Everywhere

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Angels Everywhere, Luci Shaw. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press/Iron Pen, 2022.

Summary: A collection of poems written during the first year of the pandemic, aware that even in light glancing through windows, we have intimations of “angels everywhere.”

For years, I’ve encountered single poems of Luci Shaw in various publications, always appreciating them but never moving from that to acquire a collection of her poetry. Now I wonder why I waited. I’m glad Luci Shaw has remained with us to give us this collection of poems written during the first year of the pandemic, and in her ninety-third year. References to the pandemic do arise, the air thickened with suspicion and doubt, where “Stay away!” is the command of friendship in this strangely altered world. Conscious of it or not, we are marked by these times.

Yet this is not the focus of attention of these poems but rather the “angels everywhere” in fleeting glimmers of light, in “vagrant clouds glistening.” While watching, in “Prey,” a finch being watched by her cat, who sees it as prey of blood, bone, and feather” she marks her own ravenous longing for closeness with God, to be filled “with body and blood.”

She marks the changing seasons in her poems, paralleling the changing seasons of our lives. In “Leaving” she connects the losses of foliage to loss in one’s life, concluding, “I yearn to learn the discipline of seeing something treasured,/ watching it pass, then letting it go. Letting it go.”

There are other times when the external encourages the inward look. In “Moonrise,” the sliver of moon low in the sky causes her to ask”

And when I reflect back
just the bright half of me,
how will you guess
my shadow side?

The language is often luminous, as when she speaks, in “Santa Fe Evening” of watching “a mountain/swallow the sun like a peach –/a hammered copper disc so large, so close/I felt warmed, as if a mother’s hand/touched the skin of my face.” She is reminded of the providential regularity of sunrise amid the world’s turmoil giving hope that “we too will arise from our shadowed sleep.”

Some of her poems reflect on the writing process itself. In both “In the Beginning, A Word” and “Some Poems Seem” (on facing pages), she speaks of her love of words: “This, then, is how/it seems to work, and why I love the words/that come to mind and write them down/for you, telling the curious way we live/our lives and write them into books.”

She writes of people in her life who have passed, and a new grandchild. She describes a tomato garden, forest grasses, the things she sees on walks and drives, reminding me here of Mary Oliver, seeing the transcendent in the ordinary.

In one of the latter poems, “Shaker Chair,” she observes the shape of a Shaker chair “shaped for a leanness, a cleanness of body and spirit” concluding that it is “An invitation for Christ to come sit on it, or an angel, as Merton suggested.”

She urges reading these poems aloud, always good practice, and certainly with her work. She uses wonderful words like “plangent” and “frisson” as well as the phrasing just noted, “a leanness, a cleanness.”

Many of us lived circumscribed lives during the pandemic. Shaw writes in an introduction of how the ordinary may speak as one of “God’s messengers.” Cut off from many other things, did we heed the messages in the changing seasons, watching winter give way to spring, observing the phases of the moon, the response of parched summer lawns to a long soaking rain, the fleeting glory of autumn leaves? I didn’t need to leave my neighborhood to hear the messages these bore. Now, on my walks, perhaps I will be more aware, attuned to the “angels everywhere.”

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Thumbprint in the Clay

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

thumbprint-in-the-clay

Thumbprint in the Clay, Luci Shaw. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Summary: A series of reflections, including some of the author’s poetry, on the “marks of the Maker” evident both in creation and in our lives.

True confessions. My wife is not a fan of most Christian writing. She finds much of it tedious, repetitive, and stylistically poor. And so when this book came in a shipment of books, I passed it along to her, being familiar with some of Shaw’s other work. This book passed “the wife test”! Not only did she read it through, but she kept talking about different ideas, and wanted me to read it so we could talk about it together. And we did. This does not happen often.

The basic idea of the book is a series of reflections considering the “marks of the Maker” that we see both in the creation around us and in the unfolding of our lives and relationships, marks of beauty, order, and grace that reveal something of the Maker’s character. She introduces this by speaking of a collection of mugs and other pottery around her home and how they are reflections of the artists who made each piece:

Each piece, whether it’s a mug, a mixing bowl, a milk pitcher, a vase, a turkey platter, a serving dish, is the result of combining earth and human eye and muscle with individual design, skill and intense heat. Some of these treasures are hand built, some shaped on the potter’s wheel, many bearing the thumbprint signatures of the potters themselves or their names or logos scrawled on the mug handle or the bowl base. Having that personal identifying mark makes a piece of pottery memorable to me. It’s as if the maker is proclaiming his unique identity, saying, “Don’t forget! I impressed this mark in the clay before firing to let you know it is authentically my artifact, and it will always be personal, from me to you.”

The book reflects her wide travels from her home in the Pacific Northwest on Bellingham Bay to cathedrals in New York City to the desert landscape of the American Southwest. She sees these marks in both the beauty and majesty of nature and in the great works of human artistry. There is a physicality about this book that ranges from pottery to mountains and the love of physical books, to the capabilities and frailties of the author’s body. At one point, she recounts a revelatory conversati0n with Fr. Richard Rohr, who says, “I could sit for hours and simply contemplate that tree. Those leaves. Even that one leaf in particular.” I found this resonating with my own experiences of spending a couple hours looking at and sketching a single flowering Columbine plant.

The book traces an arc moving from physical creation to our lives, which also bear unique and distinctive marks of the Maker’s work, marks that point to his forming and molding, sometimes through pain and suffering, that make us both unique creations and reflections of the Creator. Perhaps one of the most moving chapters was toward the end as she recounts the powerful impact of Clyde Kilby, Wheaton professor and C. S. Lewis scholar in recognizing, encouraging, and defending her emerging calling as a writer against her father’s aspirations for her of mission service. At one point he told her father, “Dr. Deck, excuse me, but I believe that is your vision not your daughter’s.”

The writing moves in a bit of a “stream of consciousness” mode around the chapter themes, with some of the author’s poetry interspersed. These are reflections, not an exposition. They allow us to walk alongside a deeply spiritual, keenly observant, long time spiritual pilgrim, and wise woman. At first I thought that this might be a good book for older fellow pilgrims that might give words to their journey, and indeed, this is so. But I also think that for younger pilgrims, particularly those of an artistic bent, this could be a great book for seeing what the life of faith looks like after a lifetime, what a life is like that has been “imprinted” by this way of seeing over sixty, seventy years or more. For all of us, it can be more helpful in opening us up to seeing the ways the great Artist has left “thumbprints” all over that reveal the wonders of the Artist, as well as what the Artist has made.