Twenty Poems to Pray

Drawing from the poetry of generations of esteemed writers, Gary Bouchard shows how poems often express the longings of the human heart as a kind of prayer. Emily Dickinson, Rev. Rowan Williams, Pope John Paul II, Christina Rossetti, Robert Frost, and Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, among others, offer readers an inspiring path to reflect upon and pray with poetic verse.

Arranged under six engaging themes, each selection uses the words of poets as vehicles to prompt “heaven in ordinary” or to praise like “exalted manna”; to find the right “paraphrase” for your own soul or maybe sense your “soul’s blood”; to muster up from your grief or anger “reversed thunder” or dare to articulate from your own personal anguish “Christ-side-piercing spear.”

Gary M. Bouchard is the director of the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute at Saint Anselm College, where he has taught in the English department for over three decades. During those years he also served as department chair and as the college’s executive vice president. A specialist in the field of early modern poetry, he is the author of Colin’s Campus: Cambridge Life and the English Eclogue and Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet. Gary is the consulting editor and a Catholic Press Association award-winning writer for Parable, the magazine of the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.