This is what a sacramental poetry sounds like,” says fellow poet Paul Mariani of Luci Shaw’s recently reiussued collection, What the Light Was Like. Shaw holds up both world and words to the light, revealing to us what has been there all along and teaching us how to see it for ourselves–with honesty, precision and patience.

“When William Stafford died, I wondered who there was to carry on in his spirit–humane, attentive, droll, faithful, one for whom writing poetry was as natural as breathing. And, reading What the Light Was Like, I see it has been Luci Shaw all along.
Mark Jarman, author of To the Green Man and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry

“This is what a sacramental poetry sounds like. In What the Light Was Like, Luci Shaw holds up the world and words to the light, and the light in turn gathers into a marvelous translucency to reveal what is there if only we will take the time and effort to rinse our eyes and look. This is her strongest book of poems yet, page after page gifting us with one authentic and felicitous revelation after another. Read her. She just might change the way you see what’s there before you.”
Paul Mariani, author of Thirty Days and Deaths & Transfigurations: Poems

“I have been reading Luci Shaw’s books of poems for thirty-five years or so, each book a reliable companion in exegeting the word and presence of God even as I live it. Here’s the latest: I turn a page and see a piece of creation that I had seen but not seen, recognize a soul’s syllable that I had heard but not heard–resurrection poems.”
Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message