Incremental Life, An

“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

“Shaw captures how, as we age, we may both live in the present moment, and re-live the events of our lives, bringing those increments together into a richer synthesis. Our failings and frailties, increasing with the years, may also bring increasing awareness of the presence of the One on whom we depend. And somehow, in all of this, there is the hope of incrementally growing into God’s purposes, even in the face of our own mortality.” - Bob Trube, Bob on Books

“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.

Luci Shaw (1928-2025) was born in London, England, in 1928. A poet and essayist whose writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals, in 2013 she received the tenth annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, and in 2023 she received the Kenneth N. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her lifetime of work in the Christian publishing industry. The author of over thirty-five books of poetry and creative non-fiction, she served as Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver.

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