Six Christian Poetry Anthologies Worth Reading—Mischa Willett

[Editor’s Note: Some of you will have read Ben Palpant’s excellent interview with Mischa Willet a few weeks ago. Now, we have invited Mischa to do our first “Stack Takeover,” which means that over the next two months, we’ll be reading poetry from Mischa every week, including four poems published for the first time on this Substack. Before we dive into Mischa’s poetry, we’ve asked him to introduce us to a few of his favorite anthologies of Christian poetry. May these recommendations take you on a long, long journey.]

I won’t go so far as to call it a “golden age” as yet—such claims have a way of returning to embarrass overly-confident prognosticators—but we are living in a very healthy and interesting time for poetry in general, and for poetry by persons of faith, specifically.

Whereas once the faith-based artist faced a wasteland of editors hostile to any hint of that kind of thing, we now enjoy a fulsome, thriving scene replete with journals of the highest quality, conferences, both recurring and individual that create occasions to gather, online communities, churches that double as reading venues, intelligent readers with an apparently boundless appetite for verse, and entire presses dedicated to its production. 

Enter the anthologists. 

When a particular mode of production, or of concern, reaches certain thresholds, or when public taste shifts palpably enough, artifacts attesting to it arise to delineate its contours. Often this happens around the turn of the century, or when a major figure dies. Poetry anthologies not only summarize the zeitgeist but become lasting works of art in themselves: think of W.H. Auden’s Book of Light Verse or Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. Sometimes, another organizational principle prevails. Copper Canyon has just released a luminous anthology on the occasion of the press’ 50th anniversary. FSG has published one celebrating 75 years of their influential poetry list. 

If they don’t always include the very best of what’s being done, they do serve as handy introductions to a scene, a movement, a press, a time. 

What follows is a gathering of just some of the faith-based poetry anthologies assembled in recent years. These are not the sorts of books one reads sequentially. I recommend dipping in wherever you like, and finding something that catches your ear, snags you by the heart. Maybe you’ll find a new favorite and track down their collections hereafter. If you don’t like any of it, remember that anthologies are never completely representative, and always reflect a certain editor’s taste. Your mileage may vary. 

Read around. Click wildly. Go to readings. Get recs. 

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The Soul in Paraphrase: A Treasury of Classic Devotional Poems ed. Ryken

This collection is big on the classics, the sort of poems that English Majors already know, but it’s a handsome book and features page-long explanations about why these particular poems are so moving and powerful, for those who could use some help with interpretation.