An Incremental Life
Poems
By (author) Luci Shaw
- ISBN: 9781640609792
- Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
- Pages: 96
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2025
- Format: Paperback
“Luci Shaw is a legend” —Christianity Today
This captivating collection of poems by beloved author Luci Shaw, reflects on daily ideas and activities as they arrive, bit by bit, to illuminate us with their wisdom and enlarge on the meanings of human experience. Like small messages from beyond, these incidents call us to pay attention.
In An Incremental Life, Shaw breathes life into the simpleness of the every-day and finds God in the memory of the mundane. Through her verses, she explores the intricate tapestry of existence, from the tender memories of childhood to the profound questions of mortality. Her poems are like windows opening to the soul, inviting readers to pause, reflect, and savor the beauty of the world around them.INCREMENTS
I live by increments, single
breaths of an ambient air,
marking off hours, days.
Apprenticed to grace, I tread statio
in sequentiae, edging every step
forward before venturing the next.
Staggering up towards the stony
crests of the foothills, dusty, I am
almost undone with weariness, only half
believing that the view will widen.
In my falling upward into your home,
O Faithful One, stay with me,
your wind music playing the ear of
my mind like an instrument.
“This is how life happens, one day at a time, in increments! And God is in each of them for us,” Luci Shaw
"There’s so much to ponder, appreciate and learn from Luci Shaw’s words. And so, once more, in this, her latest volume of poems, Incremental Life. What especially strikes me in reading her this time around is how she manages to blend the music of poetry with what prayer can sound like, here in our dailiness—in the whisper of trees, the flight of birds, in preparing a meal and breaking bread for others, as well as in those recollections of youth and of those here now only in memory and the radiance of naming them, and then in meditating on our own mortality as the years go by. All of it made fuller by evoking the blessings—in light and in darkness—there for the taking, if we but took the time, like Luci Shaw, to see what is there before us." —Paul Mariani, author of Deaths and Transfigurations, The Mystery of It All, and All That Will be New
"Luci Shaw’s latest collection, An Incremental Life, sings of the bright intervals in a cherished soul whose life’s oeuvre hums with a perpetual, hopeful delight for our weary sojourners. In her ninth decade, Shaw’s flourishing world of flora and fauna continues to bear fruit and multiply in the garden of her richly allusive, metaphorical imagination. Here is a wellspring of musical wisdom and meaningful sustenance where the “Faithful One” plays “the ear of / my mind like an instrument,” blessing life’s very small yet vital increments of lived experience, tender and tenacious moments ethereal yet embodied as “single / breaths of an ambient air.”
—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity and Duress
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.”
—D.S. Martin, Poet-in-Residence, McMaster Divinity College, and author of Angelicus.