Kingdom Poets — Martin

Announcing Kingdom Poets — a new blog intended to be a resource for those who are interested in Christian poetry. Every Monday you’ll be able to see a new post: a brief introduction to a Christian poet, along with one or two sample poems.

It’s brand new. My very first post went up Monday, February 15th, and features George Herbert: a fine 17th century English poet of deep faith. For my second and third posts I leapt into the late 20th century — with George Mackay Brown, a Scottish poet who wrote of his community in the remote Orkney Islands, and is not well known on this side of the Atlantic — and Jane Kenyon, a fine American poet who died while she was still quite young.

Yesterday, I posted about one of the most influential poets of the 1800s — Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ll leave it to you to check it out here. If you want to know who else is being featured, check back every Monday.

The poets represent a wide range of denominations. Early poets, of course, are primarily Anglicans and Catholics. This, however, tends to also be true today. Some poets raised in Evangelical circles have been drawn towards more traditional denominations — Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox — due perhaps to their rich histories, appreciation of the arts and beauty, liturgy, or their acceptance of poetry as an acceptable service.

Check out Kingdom Poets, become a follower, and leave a comment.

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca