A Review by Haley Hodges
This is the bliss that cannot be measured,
for love is older than pain,
and will outlast it.
– The Ninth Disclosure ~ The Joyful Giver
Let us regard these lines—shiny and new from Texan interfaith contemplative Ron Starbuck’s At The Still Point—as scientists regard extracted strands of DNA, since each figures perfectly the genetic makeup of the whole. Starbuck’s recent lab work has produced his fourth full-length collection of poetry, an imaginative cross-pollination with famed medieval author and anchoress Julian of Norwich. High time, perhaps, as one can scarcely conceive of a more fitting project for the founder of Saint Julian Press.
In addition to informing his publishing ethos, Julian’s Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love serves as poetic impetus for At The Still Point, though Starbuck takes care to assure us his book is neither a modern translation nor a mere transposition of Mother Julian, but a ‘poetic response’ and dialogue with her original text, better understood as meditation than an attempt at re-telling. Starbuck’s primary aspiration is to make contact. “My sincerest aim is to meet her where she encounters God—in longing, mercy, mystery, compassion, and love,” he writes in the preface.
I feel this aim was achieved. Entreating the post (or is it post-post?) modern soul to ‘remember what it has always known’ is a tall order, which is why Starbuck must be given his flowers for boldly leveraging the weight of eternity against our temporary—if urgent—troubles with a bright and buoyant trajectory—one that required careful and attentive planning, not to mention minutes and hours and days in close company with the anchoress.
Structurally, At The Still Point offers sixteen distinct ‘disclosures’ that walk in beautifully synchronized step with Julian’s revelations. Starbuck (as his patroness before him) would have our eyes and hearts raised to heaven until heaven descends:
And when the moment arrives,
when grace has completed its quiet work,
He will turn His face toward us—
and joy will break like the dawn.There will be no time between the last
sorry and the first light. Only a sudden rising,
where joy breaks with the dawn—
a lifting from pain into praise.
The hierarchy of the speaker’s eschatological persuasions emerges steadily throughout these poems, placing mercy over wrath and love over judgment in the divine-human continuum. Scholars squabble to this day over whether Julian’s text supports such an interpretation. Whatever the case may be, Starbuck’s verse rests actively, not passively, on this assumption—readers seeking brimstone or a great sheep/goat separation will find very little fiery satisfaction in these gentle, comforting reflections:
He speaks—without anger
without blame.
There is no judgment here,
only the warmth of loveAn ancient metanoia
not of coercion, but invitation.
Love invites and heals us.
It does not shame.
The preoccupations and concerns of these poems are of course Julian’s own—self, soul, suffering, word, Word. Collections like this one are a good tincture for readers seeking to alleviate the modern allergy to mystery, that bleak but still-tangible Enlightenment relic that shudders when deprived of the strictly empirical. Tracing the literary lineage of the mystics brought Starbuck in his youth to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which contains that surpassingly famous and remarkable line of the anchoress: ‘all manner of thing shall be well.’
It is fair to ask what an isolated and deeply religious woman—speaking from the vantage point of a tiny cell attached to St Julian’s Church—can offer the twenty-first-century reader. At The Still Point is Ron Starbuck’s answer. In Julian’s revelations, human experience is legitimized, accepted, and taken seriously as a bona fide way of knowing about reality itself. By entering into an extended poetic conversation with a medieval mystic, Starbuck has successfully opened a portal to readers hungry for a new (or else very old) kind of knowledge.
My inner Craft nerd was plagued with questions about the lineation of these poems. The disclosures were organized in essentially traditional stanzas of varying length, but if there was some internal code or key as to why they separated when they did, I couldn’t find it, which was also true at the level of the line. The logic of the artist is often a mystery—but of course, in addition to mysteries that awe, there are mysteries that make one squint and scratch one’s head.
Because of its particular open-armed gentleness, I’d recommend this collection to anyone lingering in the liminal ‘seeker’ category—At The Still Point (and Julian by extension) is an exceptionally welcoming companion for anyone desiring to sit at that cross-section particular to spirituality—the place where the horizontal plane meets its vertical counterpoint.
At The Still Point by Ron Starbuck was published by Julian Press in 2025.
Haley Hodges received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University in 2025. She holds additional qualifications from Hope College, Shenandoah Conservatory, and Oxford University. Her work has been featured in Cassandra Voices, Ekstasis, t’ART, Reformed Journal and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, Eros Rex, is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2026.