Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse

The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse brings together the work of poets from across the English-speaking world to celebrate the sacred art of poetry in all of its pied beauty.

Chosen by acclaimed Newman scholar Edward Short, the collection captures not only the range but the richness of Christian verse. The last comparable anthology of Christian poetry to appear was Donald Davie’s Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981): a proper successor, one more reflective of the true scope and variety of Christian poetry, has been long overdue.

The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse supplies that need with a dazzling compilation encompassing over eight centuries of Christian verse by poets extending from Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton and Henry Vaughan to Wiliam Cowper, Isaac Watts, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and Dana Gioia. In between, readers will find poems about faith, hope, love, loss, praise, rejoicing, mortality and immortality from such beloved poets as St Robert Southwell, Thomas Traherne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Wallace Stevens, Charles Causley, Elizabeth Jennings, James McAuley, and Richard Wilbur.

A perfect anthology for schools, colleges and the general reader, The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse will serve as a welcome reaffirmation for readers around the world of how vital Christian verse has been and remains to our deeply humanizing, deeply civilizing Christian inheritance.

“This handsome book certainly contains a great deal of fine poems -- some very familiar and much loved, others much less familiar but still deeply affecting. Edward’s Short’s anthology will serve a teaching role very well…”   Peter Costello, The Irish Catholic