Annunciations

Trained as an academic, Kathleen Henderson Staudt (Kathy) has read and studied poetry for most of her life, writing a scholarly book and many articles on the work of the Anglo Welsh Catholic poet and artist David Jones. She began writing poetry herself at mid-life and has found that the practice of poetry has become a spiritual practice of attention, enabling her to dwell deeply in the richness and the challenges of life, loss, relationships, and transitions. In Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life (2006) the poetry takes her through the years of child-rearing, exploring along the way themes of healing, celebration, loss, and letting go. Good Places (2017) traces a physical journey between an old home and a new, a journey that quietly becomes a time of spiritual transformation. In this volume (Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture, first published in 2003), she explores connections between biblical story and the life of the imagination. These poems are called annunciations because in various ways they respond to an invitation to meet and receive the holy in the midst of ordinary life. They reflect ways of saying “yes" and sometimes “ o" to the mystery that reveals itself in the depths of human experiences and relationships.