A Review by Kelly Sawin
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty.” — Anne Lamott
And so is the stance that Poch takes toward poetry in God’s Poems—that poetry and Christianity are not at odds, but that poetry, in its ability to sit a multiplicity of meanings atop one another simultaneously, is appropriate to a Christian perspective that finds a depth of divine meaning growing out of our concrete reality, and especially out of our relationship with language.
In his first chapter he recounts a position he once shared in a lecture: that Jesus was a poet. Poch, a committed Christian who is serious about engaging with the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God, suggests that if we take seriously the claim that Jesus is the word made flesh, and that he is the truth (as per John 14:6), then poetry must necessarily be engaged with him as the art of poetry has an especially privileged relationship with truth. After providing a list of definitions of poetry, suggesting that even the art itself evades singular, easy meaning (as do poems themselves), Poch offers the observation that poetry is the language of repetition with variation. This definition in mind, the Bible in its entirety may also be considered poetry, he argues, and thus the ultimate model for poetry. And, given the making of man in the image of a creative God, by engaging with the creative art of poetry we may engage with a particularly Christian relationship between divinity and humanity.
For the Christian wondering how his theology and a serious, even generally literal, interpretation of the Bible may square with a serious and non-propagandizing relationship with the art of poetry, Poch spends 15 chapters unfolding individual poems and exposing the interaction of the body of their craft with the breath of Christian spirituality in all its complexities, ecstasies, mysteries, and challenges. The reader will find herself less preached at and more invited into an excited way of seeing—of opening the challenging boxes of poems and daring to believe there exists within them real meaning and truth while keeping certainty—that rigid antithesis to faith—and finite interpretations at a reasonable distance. She will find Poch’s arm warmly around her shoulder as he excitedly points to the sights in the landscape of his selection of poems—this bit of craft, that sort of form—all forming the heavenly skyscape that declares God’s glory, as the psalmist says. And his glory is no resolved thing: it is moving and alive, and that is precisely Poch’s point: as the Bible is a living document, so too the poem. So too the writer and reader of the poem. At times the essays veer into deeply personal territory, and one exits God’s Poems not only refreshed by an honest, rigorous engagement with quality poems, but feeling as though you’ve met a friend: one who upholds the dignity of texts and brings them into sharp clarity in their own right; of ideas; and of the imperfect people who grapple with them.
God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and Christian Imagination by John Poch was published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2022.
Kelly Sawin‘s work has appeared in River Teeth: Beautiful Things, Ekstasis Magazine, The Windhover, the Appalachian Review, Susurrus, the Virginia Literary Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2024 National Poetry Series, a semifinalist in the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, and in the 2024 Orison Poetry Prize. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.