The legacy of Luci Shaw

It’s hard to write about someone who should be well known – who is well known within a narrow tribe of Christian artists – but whose name draws blank stares from most who hear it. It is my privilege, then, to celebrate with you (or introduce you to) the life and work of Luci Shaw.

On December 1, 2025, pre-eminent poet Luci Shaw went to be with the Lord at the age of 96. The author of eighteen poetry collections, beginning with Listen to the Green (1978), and continuing through to An Incremental Life (2025), Luci Shaw is a pioneer of contemporary Christian poetry.

Writing into the gap

It’s true that expressions of Christian faith have been important through the centuries in the poetry of the English-speaking world. Consider such names as George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But since World War I, secular voices have dominated, and the church seems to have retreated into silently “minding its own business,” which too many have considered to not include the arts.

When Luci Shaw graduated from Wheaton College in 1953, there were few venues for publishing serious Christian poetry – few Christians were reading poetry other than hymns and devotional meditations, and the verses that were being shared were generally not well written.

“Perhaps that’s why I persisted,” she said in an interview in Image. “I felt like writing creatively was a job given me at a time when few others were making those connections, or valuing the kind of perception good poetry can offer. I wanted to wake people up. I wanted others to notice what I was noticing.”

In those years, there was also a broader disconnect as modernist poetry had become the territory of university programs, which valued esoteric poems ideal for analysis in a university classroom, but of less interest to the general public. At the same time, the church was still in retreat from having had a leading role in culture, due to the after-effects of the Enlightenment. What was needed – and what we still need – is a poet like Luci Shaw.

Fresh parables

Luci Shaw began writing accomplished poetry of faith at a time when others were excluding religious beliefs from their verse or hiding them behind masks of indirection. She’s the kind of poet who invites her readers into her verse – including those who think poetry has nothing to offer them – yet still she leaves us with good reason to want to go back to read the poem again.
Like our Lord’s admonition to consider the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, notice the sort of insights her poems make – such as in “Crossing the Cascades” where,

Down one precipitous cliff
a single seed fell from its
mother cone and . . .
like a toenail
that catches and holds,
the root-ling thrusts its
stab of life, its act of faith,
into the blind rock.

Poet in translation

Luci Shaw’s accomplishments are far too numerous to outline here. Besides her work as an editor, she served as an English stylist for Moody Press and Intervarsity Press in the early ‘50s, which led to contributing as an English stylist on various Bible translation projects – The Living Bible, The Message and Today’s New International Version. Anyone with an understanding of the balance needed in Bible translation will realize how significant it would be to have a poet’s attentiveness to finalize the text.

Since 1988, she has also been writer-in-residence at Regent College in Vancouver. But I must get personal here, to share a proper tribute to her. Luci has been a dear friend and a significant influence on my life.

Unpredictable legacy

How can I express my gratitude? One of the earliest poems I ever had published was accepted by Luci Shaw for Radix. I remember how thrilled I was later when she wrote an endorsement for my first full-length poetry collection, Poiema (2008). Next, I was further affirmed by this excellent poet when she accepted me as her editor for her poetry collection Scape (2013), which appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series. Perhaps the greatest honour she gave was to ask me to write an endorsement for her for her eighteenth poetry book, An Incremental Life (Paraclete, 2025). I am clearly the one honoured by being asked to do this. The following is my endorsement as it appears in that book.

“For decades I have sat at Luci Shaw’s feet, listening to her lyrical wisdom, her playful music, her spiritual insight and her deep connectedness to the natural world. In The Incremental Life, Luci Shaw shares her metapoetics – choosing ‘words like matches, / striking them to see what happens next.’ As a nonagenarian, she acknowledges her shrinking life, yet invites us even into this experience. Still she wrestles with faith, and says to God, ‘Come, now. Fill / the gaps, mend the widening cracks in my aging / soul. I’m moving in your direction, but I move / more slowly, see more dimly, require more daily.’ As always, though, Luci Shaw is as wide-eyed as a child. ‘My heart,’ she writes, ‘is ambushed by simple beauty.’”

A poet’s legacy is an unpredictable thing. Some poets are virtually unknown until being discovered posthumously; some are popular in their own time, but quickly fall out of fashion after they’re gone. Luci Shaw is one poet whose legacy deserves to be preserved and to grow significantly. I pray this may be true, and that, if you are unfamiliar with her poems, you will make that enriching discovery.

The eye of a poet

Many of Luci Shaw’s book covers feature her own photography. Her website includes a photo gallery and explains: “Her poems and photos are companions, each contributing imaginatively to the other. The discovery of form and detail is the key to both. They celebrate Creation in all its diversity.”