From the time she was a child in Toronto, celebrated poet Luci Shaw has sent Advent greetings to her friends and family with a carefully crafted original poem. What began as a simple childhood exercise has now become a beloved annual tradition. Though a number of these poems have appeared elsewhere, Accompanied by Angels gathers all of them for the first time into a collection for all readers for any season of the year.
Beginning with the joy, terror, and wonder of the annunciation, Shaw leads the reader on a poetic journey through the birth, life, and death of Jesus the Christ, culminating in the joyous and unexpected wonder of his resurrection. Her subjects run from the mundane to the sublime, from birds in flight and waiting old men to fiery angels and storm-ravaged ridges.

Luci Shaw is Writer in Residence at Regent College,Vancouver, British Columbia. Her other books includePolishing the Petoskey Stone, Writing the River, TheAngles of Light, and, written with Madeleine L'Engle,WinterSong, Friends for the Journey, and APrayerbook for Spiritual Friends.

Luci Shaw's profile page

Scott Cairns
"In the language of salt and sinew, grit and grace, Luci Shaw articulates into fresh apprehension the Word made flesh, the Holy One hallowing all things by His becoming one of them."

Jeanne Murray Walker
"What a remarkable steadiness of attention is documented in this book! It is deeply moving to think how these poems were made ritually, one a year, slowly accumulating for sixty years. Luci Shaw is one of our most gifted poets; maybe that's why this archaeological dig to her beginnings makes me so happy. It is fascinating to watch her marshal her forces, gather linguistic power, and fill a lifetime to the brim with limpid, startling poems."

John Leax
"Luci Shaw knows that 'what must be announced' cannot easily be said. She knows that incarnation makes 'impossible demands' on the poet. A faithful bearer of the Word, she risks everything. Metaphor after metaphor, image after complicating image, she sustains her dedication to making the old story new. In her poems we find 'that flash of absolute knowing' that cannot be earned but is given by grace to the open and waiting."

Julia Kasdorf
"For good reason Luci Shaw has become an institution of the Christian literary world, and here is her sequence dealing with an explicitly Christian subject — the life of Jesus Christ, vividly figured over the course of the writer's lifelong imaginative work. These lucid, engaging narrative lyrics of both free and formal verse could serve as devotional reading for the devout or as compelling invitations to the seeker. Carefully crafted yet never pretentious or aloof, they bring the sacred close without denying its inexplicable mystery so that, reading them, we too may seem to be accompanied by angels."