POEMS, PRAYERS & PRAISE

Montgomery finds light amid the darkness in this collection of devotional poems.

The author grew up as a child of divorce, and the pain of her parents’ split lingered with her for years. “How can you pick up the pieces,” she asks in her inaugural poem, “When there are no more pieces left / Of a life that is just bad memories / Of promises never kept?” She found the answer in her religious faith: “Lord, pick up the pieces, / Those pieces left of me, / Those parts of me so broken / That no one else can see” (“Promises Never Kept”). The connection between life’s difficulties and the comfort offered by God is the primary theme of these poems, which channel emotions such as fear, doubt, and grief into spiritual devotion. The loss of loved ones is a source of particular heartache, and Montgomery includes an entire section devoted to emotions surrounding the loss of people such as her daughter, her mother-in-law, and her pastor. Here the poet struggles with the question surrounding her daughter Angela’s spina bifida, which ultimately caused her death shortly before her 8th birthday: “Why is she in a wheelchair? / Why is the sky so blue? / The Lord has all the answers. / I haven’t got a clue. // Why is she always smiling? / I guess that you can say / She really must be happy / Just sitting there that way” (“Little Angel”). Montgomery’s plainspoken, end-rhyming verses recall, in their best moments, the sharp simplicity of Emily Dickinson. Most of the poems avoid specific, concrete language—there are vague abysses and lights, undefined battles and unnamed people—which can cause the poems to sometimes run together. Each section is preceded by a prose introduction, however, which offer some context for the succeeding poems, explaining what was going on in the poet’s life to inspire them. Taken together, the poems and prose pieces reveal the inner struggle many religious people face in reckoning their belief in a loving God with the difficulties of life in this world.

An earnest and often affecting collection of Christian poems.