I Call to You from Time

The desire and struggle to pray pulses through this spiritually resonant collection in forms as various as psalms, Tai Chi, meditation, needlework, lament, and thanksgiving. Even poems not overtly about prayer lead the reader into prayer-like contemplation as the poetconsiders war, environmental devastation, corporate greed, and poverty as personal, as well as sociopolitical, subjects.

Crossing borders between the distant and the local, the historic and the contemporary, I Call to You from Time also reaches beyond the temporal to the eternal. Poems responding to paintings of the Virgin Mary are echoed in others about the poet’s own motherhood and her son’s deployments to—and wounding in—Iraq and Afghanistan. The poet discovers Our Lady of Guadalupe emblazoned on a toss pillow at Walmart and encounters the Virgin Mary at a rest stop in Nebraska. Laundry hung in a neighbor’s yard recalls Tibetan prayer flags, while deers’ hoof prints in the snowy woods lead to evidence of fracking.

Personal, political, and planetary brokenness are encountered throughout, yet the poems in I Call to You from Time seek to create from their shards a mosaic of meaning in which we find ourselves connected to one another and to the divine.