Imago Dei, edited by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

With figures like Wendell Berry, Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns in our midst, we are living in a vibrant era of Christian poetry. This stunning collection includes poems by these and many other authors, gathered by Christian Century poetry editor Jill Peláez Baumgaertner and selected from Christianity and Literature. One might expect poetry from an academic journal to be self-consciously experimental or emotionally thin. This collection is anything but. The poetic voices are consistently engaging and full of the human voice in perplexity, wonder and grief, as in these concluding lines of a poem by David Craig, in which he speaks of life’s fleeting moments as “altars we build for the Most High, / in the hopes that he will take them, and us / when the time comes, which will always be too soon: / our lives, as Mary says, a wave of a hand.”