Welcome back to the daily poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by an English poet named Elizabeth Jennings. She lived from 1926 to 2001.

She received in 1953 an award for the Arts Council of Great Britain Prize for the Best Book of Poems.

She won the Somerset Ma'am Prize for A Way of Looking in 1955 and the W.H. Smith Literary

Award for Collected Poems in 1987. She also received an honorary doctorate of divinity from

Durham University in 2001 and in 1992,

commander of the Order of the British Empire. So needless to say, she is a highly well-respected

poet of the 20th century. The poem that I'm going to read today is called Act of the Imagination.

It's from her collected poems. It goes like this. Surely, an act of the

imagination helps more than one of faith when a doubt brushes us. We need strong passion to summon

miracles. Life after death, bread turning into flesh and blood from wine, I need to cast

around and find an image for the most divine concepts. My mind must move on holy ground. And then the

hardest creed, the rising from death when Christ indeed bled finally. Ideas cannot come as barren notions. Yes, I always need

Herbert's sonnet prayer, say, or that great Giotto painting for my heart to leap to God. I want to

meet him in my own poems. God is metaphor in rising up. I watch a lucid sky and see a silver cloud and Christ behind it.

This is part of faith.

Here the great hour is sung and let faith be loud with the best imagining we have.

This is how I approach my God-made man.

Thus I learn to love and yes, like Thomas, know Christ through a touch.

After hearing that poem, I'm guessing it's not a surprise that Elizabeth Jennings was a devout Catholic,

or that her work was highly influenced by England's best Catholic poet, perhaps, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thematically, you see a lot of Hopkins here. You hear the same images, the same questions, the same

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