I WAS sad to learn in the past week that the American poet Luci Shaw had died. It was not surprising news: she was in her late nineties and had been unwell, but it was still a loss.

She was a very good poet and a great soul. Born in England in 1928, she attended university in the United States, and eventually became a naturalised citizen there, but not until 1995. By that time, many collections of her poetry had been published, she had encouraged innumerable other writers, and she had been, for many years, writer-in-residence at Regent College, Vancouver.

She was an unashamedly Christian poet, and one with a great gift for “telling it slant”: for incarnating or bodying forth her faith in vivid, unexpected imagery, much of it drawn from a keen and detailed observation of the natural world, especially the greening glory of her own garden. She was a great friend of the American writer Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle In Time. I first met her in Cambridge more than 20 years ago, when she came to receive a literary award on L’Engle’s behalf, as L’Engle herself was, at that time, too ill to travel.

Luci took a kind interest in my poetry, and, as poetry editor of various American journals, she was the first person to publish my work in the States; so I owe her a debt of gratitude for that. The many tributes being published to her now make it clear that I was just one among many fledgling poets and writers whom she nurtured and encouraged. I included her beautiful Christmas poem “Kenosis” in Waiting on the Word, my Advent and Christmas anthology. The poem has a vivid and yet delicate opening stanza:

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.

I shared poetry readings with her in North America, and was very glad to write this sonnet in her honour for her 90th birthday:

For Luci Shaw

Luci I love the gift you have for green:
Green fingers in your garden, a green art
In writing too, a feel for life and growth,
Kindly encouragement and yet a keen
Eye for the form, for what needs weeding out
To give a poem room to breathe and grow.
I sense your patience when that growth is slow,
Knowing that slow growth bears a fuller fruit.
I love your eye for detail too, the rich
Particularity of earthy things,
The way you strike the right note till it sings,
And all you have withheld is within reach;
The poem opens for us, and makes room
For fleeting apprehensions to come home.