Love Set You Going

[Morley’s] comments are gentle, meditative, and perceptive. She avoids the overly devotional and sentimental, and has a gift for picking out the killer line or the telling stanza.

[On OUR LAST AWAKENING] Morley writes with clarity and without simplification. Her theology is humane, experiential, and fed by the same poetry of scripture which Donne held so close. Morley’s God is not some object of our knowledge but the deepest cause for our wonder, through death as much as through life. She doesn’t unweave the poems by over-commenting on them, but allows enough unsaid for them to continue their work. I think Donne would be more than happy to have this book named after one of his own reflections on “our last awakening”.

As always [Morley] is both alert to the literary nature of the poems she discusses and also profound, drawing the reader into meditating on what is being said without seeking to be at all “preachy” or to push a particular religious message.

[On HAPHAZARD BY STARLIGHT] Janet Morley has the great gift of being able to write simply and succinctly about a poem in a way that invites the reader into the heart of the poem. A fine poet herself, and one of the best liturgical crafters of prayer in our time (her first book, All Desires Known is, to my mind, one of the best collections of prayers in the modern era), Morley brings to her writing the poet’s sensitivity to language, the critic’s capacity to analyse and interpret, the theologian’s discernment of the sacred with the teacher’s ability to communicate insight in fresh and memorable ways.

[On THE HEART'S TIME] Varied, beautiful, provocative and nurturing.

Morley takes a poem, interprets it and applies it, marking a pilgrimage of the heart . . . each interpretation making me feel as if I was gently taken apart and remade anew.

There’s a freedom and rashness in these poems sometimes lacking in religious writing. A wonderful idea, and nicely done.

[On ALL DESIRES KNOWN] A beautiful book, made newly useful.