Remembering Luci Shaw

 

Luci Shaw (1928-2025)

The poet Luci Shaw has died. She was 96 years old and still writing and publishing. Her last book - An Incremental Life - was published in April 2025.

Luci was born in London, England, and lived in Canada, Australia, and the U.S.A. She graduated with High Honors from Wheaton College in 1953. She and her first husband Harold Shaw founded Harold Shaw Publishers. Harold died in February 1986. Since 1988, Luci was a Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. 

Luci lectured in North America and abroad on topics such as art and spirituality, the Christian imagination, poetry-writing, and journal-writing as an aid to artistic and spiritual growth.

Luci resided in Bellingham, Wahington with her husband John Hoyte. They are members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

A charter member of the Chrysostom Society of Writers, Shaw is author of fourteen volumes of poetry. The Society support s writers through travel expenses for meetings or conferences with a focus on faith-informed writing.

I knew Luci from my time in Wheaton, Illinois. We worshipped at the same church and were in the same Bible study group. Luci and Harold were pillars of Bathany Chapel, a fellowship of the Plymouth Brethren. A very conservative Christian group, the Plymouth Brethren do not permit women to speak in the gathered assembly. I had the impression that this was a frustration to Luci who expressed herself through her poetry. She eventually found a more tolerant fellowship among the Episcopalians.

In my years of friendship with Luci, I found her always to be thoughtful, gracious, and hospitable. I was a terrible writer in those days, but she encouraged me and gave me some direction. May her memory be eternal before the Lord, the Lover of Mankind.

Related reading: Luci Shaw's Book "Harvesting Fog"; Luci Shaw's Genesis for Children

Luci Shaw's New Book "Harvesting Fog"

In Harvesting Fog, Luci Shaw uses the gathering of moisture from mist as the prevailing metaphor for writing poetry about seen and unseen realities.

Harvesting Fog is Luci Shaw's 30th book, released in 2010 by Pinyon Publishing. The title comes from a reference in the National Geographic Magazine about Lima, Peru, where there is little rain but a persistent, clammy fog. Residents of Lima collect water from the nets they hang outside, on which the fog condenses into water droplets. Shaw uses this as a metaphor for the gathering of images and ideas for poems that link transcendent with immanent, as Malcolm Guite has commented, "heaven in the ordinary."

“One might argue with Heidegger that only in poetry—particularly the lyric poem—can Being achieve adequate articulation, find a "local habitation and a name," become known. For a poet of profound religious sensibility such as Luci Shaw, whose poems so brilliantly and movingly locate authentic Being in the forms and processes of nature, the lyric impulse often approaches the incarnational. At one point she writes, "Something sacramental speaks/in the rinsing of hard stone by mountain run-off." The same could be said of the elegantly crafted poems, word made flesh, in Harvesting Fog.” —B. H. Fairchild, author, The Art of the Lathe

Read more here.