Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church

Word Made Fresh: An Introduction to Poetry for the Church

Abraham Van Engen

Published by Eerdmans in 2025

pp / $ /

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What can I say to convince you to read this book? It’s the best book on poetry I’ve read, but I doubt saying that helps much. Hardly anyone likes poetry. Nobody seems to get it. Few read it. When then should you read a book about poetry?

I once had someone send me a note unsubscribing from the Reformed Journal because I pushed poetry too much. I see the readership numbers of the poems we publish up against our blog posts and featured articles. Poetry is a lost cause. Why pay attention to it? Here is Abram Van Engen’s two-word argument for poetry: The Bible. “Poetry fills the Bible,” Van Engen writes on page one. Poetry makes up one-third of the Old Testament, including the Psalms, prophets, and the creation story. Some of the New Testament’s most memorable passages, including the Beatitudes, are poems. “Clearly, God delights in poetry” (2). Because the Bible invites us into poetry, Van Engen says, we should recognize “poetry is for us.” (2).

Most of us don’t believe that. We think poetry is written for some mysterious tribe—other poets, perhaps, or academic elites. “Somehow, American culture has driven deep into our psyches the sense that all poems worth reading are poems that almost nobody can read” (70). But poems, Van Engen says, are like pools: they can be entered and enjoyed at any depth. Van Engen’s advice for what to do with incomprehensible and inscrutable poems is helpful: skip them. We should read until we find a poem we connect with, and then take the time to poke around inside the poem and explore its rooms. (As he points out, the word “stanza” is an Italian word meaning “room.”)

Early in the book, Van Engen explains a technique poets often use called “defamiliarization.” Through the process of presenting the familiar in unfamiliar ways, poets use language to help us see the extraordinary in the ordinary. He quotes T.S. Eliot: “Poetry takes something that we know already and turns it into something new.” In Hebrew, Van Engen points out, the word typically translated as “new” may also be translated as “fresh.” “Poets are people who make things fresh” (12). 

The book is divided into two halves: “How?” and “Why?” “How?” offers straightforward advice like: “Read just for the joy of it. Do not feel compelled to have deep thoughts or earth-shattering revelations. If such things come, welcome them. But mostly they won’t. Our responses to poetry will range from boredom to pleasure . . . That’s good. Notice these responses. And remember that the response you have is the point. Poetry aims at experience. Boredom and confusion constitute experiences as well” (42).

Van Engen repeatedly steers us toward poetry that helps us pay attention to our world and our lives. One side benefit of this book is that it’s its own anthology. There are more than 50 poems reproduced inside, from a diverse group of writers from John Donne to Gwendolyn Brooks. By illuminating form, introducing the reading technique of erasure, and asking helpful questions to bring to a text, Van Engen invites—but never insists—we venture into the deep end of the pool.

In the “Why?” section, Van Engen’s purpose in writing for the church—which is a thread throughout both sections—is amplified. Themes like truth-telling, naming creation, rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep are explored. While these are not exclusively Christian, a case can be made they are particularly Christian concerns. 

“The fact that God reads every poem,” Van Engen writes near the end of the book, “can make poetry feel, quite often, like prayer. I think this is true even for an unbelieving poet. . . . Why, after all, do people pray? List any motives you can for praying, and you will find a poem in this world that arises from that motive as well” (247). We’re already familiar with poems that are hymns. Why not add poems that are prayers to our spiritual repertoire? 

I must add I was heartened by Van Engen’s repeated looks at poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Van Engen, I’m a big fan of Hopkins, a tortured Jesuit who died thinking of himself as a failure and yet is now recognized as perhaps the greatest master of sound and rhythm ever. Add to that the fact that Hopkins’s poems are full of theological insight and the case is made that his poetry is for us. 

I might also note that it’s not uncommon for reviewers to praise a book overall and yet still point out a quibble they have here or there. I have no quibbles. Abram Van Engen writes clearly and crisply and this book is simply remarkable. 

What can I say to convince you to read this book? I’m not sure I can. But I can tell you reading Abram Van Engen and the poetry he explores will bless you and enrich your life. Why not take the invitation and give this book—and poetry–a try?