Reading Luci Shaw’s last collection

An Incremental Life

Luci Shaw
Paraclete, 2025.

In the introduction to her final poetry collection, Luci Shaw writes about the slow, winter growth of an amaryllis bulb on her kitchen windowsill. A little further on, she reflects on her own long life: “I can live only one day at a time, and my hope is to live that one day fully and richly, sharing the minor increments of growth and maturity that attest to God’s divine purpose and patience in my life.”

In her poems, Shaw reflects on aging and memory as well as small moments of everyday life, increments that let her live “apprenticed to grace.” These are gifts made more poignant by her recent death last December.

Unfolding paths

I read an earlier collection of Shaw’s poems while on holiday in the south of England in February 2020. We didn’t yet know that those free and windy late-winter days would need to last us through the fettered time of lockdown to come. Her description of Michelangelo’s Pieta returned to me throughout that stilled period: “How permanent is this paralysis? When should we expect the miracle? How will stone become bread, become living word again?” The stone sculpture’s patient/impatient stillness echoed the waiting of those days of covid which called us, too, into waiting for miraculous change. 

Since then, I seek out Shaw’s poetry for solace and encouragement as well as for her polished ability to notice. She makes observing a spiritual practice as she collects small, mundane moments and reshapes them as prayer: the donation of a hand-knit jumper, the sudden spring winds against the window and handwork in her garden. In Shaw’s poems, these moments become heartwork, too; naming and blessing them, she finds grace everywhere.

Honest prayers

She writes, as always, with simplicity and clarity, leaving room for her wordplay and awareness. She also offers new-to-me words that catch my attention. “Prevenient grace” prepares and enables us to respond to God. “Ensorceled” means enchanted and fascinated. Shaw slips unfamiliar words into gentle poems like small illuminating gifts – candles or sparks, light for the darkness.

Many poems read like straightforward, honest prayers as she asks for patience and strength, such as “Questions like Ants”: “I’ve argued with You for years, have waited, silent, / unwilling, unable to give up. Come, now. Fill / the gaps, mend the widening cracks in my aging / soul. I move more slowly now, see more dimly, / require more daily. But I’m moving in your direction.”

Shaw found ways to look back on her life, sharing her increments and teaching us quiet truth. But her patience is never static. These last poems are filled with images of growth – gardens, fields and birds – and travel, even pilgrimage. In “Map” she writes: “What I am learning / is that an intersection offers / a new perspective . . .”

Shaw gives us poems from her journey and for our own unfolding paths. The pages of this, her last book, contain the continuing presence of the poet. Like the amaryllis that flowers in the book’s introduction, these slow-grown poems of patience and attention will ring and echo on through the days to come.