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Poetry readings are in vogue, especially among young people. In their extreme form, they are actual competitions, "poetry slams" with prizes for the poet who wins the most applause. "At the beginning of the twenty-first century," concludes Dana Gioia, poet and former General Foods executive recently nominated by President Bush to serve as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,

a broad and diverse coalition of Americans has created a public space for poetry. This huge populist revival happened almost entirely outside the university. For the first time in half a century the academic poetry world is balanced by an equally large amount of activity in the general culture.

In his 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?" in The Atlantic Monthly, Gioia noted that for the most part poetry has become decidedly a minority taste, like atonal music, "the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group." Gioia also argued that this need not be so, if only poets were willing "to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom. … to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry."

Gioia now sees evidence of change, not least in the popularity of poetry as a performing art. But what of the evangelical world? Has the revival Gioia sees in the general culture penetrated there as well? Should we care? For that matter, why should Christians—busy Christians, Christians loyal to the priorities of the kingdom of God, Christians redeeming the time—read poetry in the first place?

One place to turn for an answer is The Green Earth: Poems of Creation (Eerdmans), the latest collection by evangelical poet and author Luci Shaw. In her brief introduction, Shaw focuses our attention, as a good poet does, precisely upon the very act of focusing attention:

A poem is a little lens through which we can examine at close range some of the "insignificant" details of the universe, a miniature window on the world. In such small works of art the poet is lending you, the reader, her eyes in hopes that your own eyes will be captivated by things you've never noticed before.

Why notice? To enjoy. Enjoy means to take pleasure in something or someone. It also means to have as one's lot or advantage, as in "the book enjoyed brisk sales." In our busyness, not only do we fail to smell the roses, but even the toast or the coffee, or our child's newly washed skin. We don't taste our food or see the rain or feel our clothes. In such oblivion, these good things might as well vanish. To us they are as good as gone.

Poets take us by the hand, slow us down, and say, "Look! Listen! Breathe in! Pay attention!"

With both hands unjewelled and with unbound hair
beauty herself stands unselfconscious where
she is enough to have, and worth the always holding.
The mind perceiving her, the heart enfolding
echoes the unchanged pattern from above
that praises God for loveliness, and love.

Glory again to God for word and phrase
whose magic, matching the mind's computed leap,
lands on the lip of truth
(plain as a stone well's mouth, and just as deep)

Poetry, then, can rouse us to experience life more fully to the glory of God. Luci Shaw is a deeply Christian poet, and so her poems are suffused with divine illumination in which God himself spotlights things for the poet, who in turn points them out to us:

I begin to understand how weather
The wet gusts that all yesterday afternoon
swept our mountains with their gray silk
skirts—their cold cloth rinsed our faces—
have calmed and recombined tonight
in the placid lake that gleams below our window.
It shows its stormy origins—

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December 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 13