Beloved theologian and bishop Graham Kings has been writing poetry for thirty-five years, with many of his poems used in retreats and preaching throughout the Anglican Communion. This collection brings together Graham's poems on a range of devotional subjects.

Graham Kings

Title page

Copyright information

Dedication

Preface

List of illustrations

SEASONS

Christmas

The Gospel of the Song

Matter of Great Moment

The Ultimate Became Intimate

A Cord 

The Nativity

Epiphany: Magi Momentum

Farcical Journey

Through Centuries

Feigning Faith

Offerings Presented

We Refugees

Terror Unleashed

Perennial Problem

Holy Week and Easter

Gethsemane and the Trinity

The Hostage Deal

Hooked

Easter Prayer

Finished in the New Creation

Pentecost 

The Image of Her Father

Pentecost Prose Poem

Holy Spirit: Remembrancer

PEOPLE

Turning Point: Augustine

Beyond Imagining: Mandela

Prophet: Bishop Muge

Thanksgiving: Bishop John V. Taylor

A Prior Meeting: Anselm

Visit of Holiness: Rowan

Three Popes

Karol Wojtyla: Polish Pope

Joseph Ratzinger: European Pope

Jorge Bergoglio: Latin American Pope

PLACES

Gallery into Oratory

Jesus Goes Underground

Pillar in Poets’ Corner

Is Jesus the Son of Allah?

Meandering in South Sudan

BIBLE

First Written Gospel

Six Poems on Luke

Profit and Loss

Revolutionary Love

Combines or Labourers?

The Resistance Movement

The Cost of Living

The Point of the Nails

Tender Attention

Women in the Bible

Sarah

Miriam

Ruth

Esther

Magdalene

Lydia

Priscilla

PRAYER

Prayer Stool

The Pause

Prayer and God

The Foolishness of God

The Kingdom of God

The Strangeness of God

The Maturity of God

Boat Prayer

By the Waters of Delivery

Litanies

Bible Litany

Likeness Litany

Pentecost Litany

Trinity Litany

Acknowledgements and Notes

• Will be supported by a series of author events and a dedicated Nourishing Connections website in April. • Lecture tours to Virginia Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School are already booked for 2021. • Many of the poems in this book can be used by local churches for worship and spiritual reflection.

Beloved theologian and bishop Graham Kings has been writing poetry for thirty-five years, with many of his poems used in retreats and preaching throughout the Anglican Communion. This collection brings together Graham's poems on a range of devotional subjects, looking on the world with the eyes of faith and observing the sacred in the ordinary. With this perspective, all things are capable of pointing beyond themselves to the truth and beauty of God. Graham's poetry celebrates the people, places, art, past and present, the practice of prayer, the stories that shape our lives, the rhythms of the spiritual year that have been for him doorways to the divine.

'Nourishing Connections is a rich feast of words meant to be read and pondered over. I have found it enlightening and helpful in descrying wonderful glimpses of the divine in the mundane.'

'Like a wild flower discovered in a field of wheat, poetry captures a distilled significance. Graham Kings' poems celebrate the intimacies and the immensities of his faith and the world, as well as the love which connects them, and they point us towards the beauty we might have too easily have passed by.'

'Seamus Heaney said that good poetry offers 'phrases that feed the soul'. Nourishing Connections is full of rich and memorable phrases that do indeed nourish the soul and make fresh and illuminating connections for the mind. It is a collection that will reward close reading and slow savouring.'

Graham Kings' exquisitely constructed début as a poet does indeed nourish connections, integrating the scope and depth of his experience as a bishop with a profound devotion to tradition and literature. His poems range in form from the pithy and playful to a prose poem, as fusing the biblical with the contemporary, he is for us 'replaying memory and pattern of promise.'

'These poems are playful and serious at the same time, touching lightly and deeply on little and big matters. Above all, there is a biblical imagination at work and play, generating connections in all directions - past, present and future. And, as with any meaning thoroughly rooted in the Bible, there is a combination of tough truth and God-centred encouragement.'

'Attentive to the providential word play of language and the lyric charms of rhythm, rhyme and repetition, Graham Kings's poems are meditations for a spirit-hungry modern generation. Take one a day to chew, absorb and digest.'

'Luminous and evocative poems that focus issues raised by lives both modern and biblical in a way that no prose ever could. They will accompany many people fruitfully on their journey of faith.'

'I particularly enjoy the way the poems of Graham Kings chime with those of George Herbert, setting the ordinary and the slight with the strange and permanent. I value the emphasis on the strangeness of God.'

'Nourishing Connections is erudite and often international in its concerns, and yet always remains accessible for a lover of poetry. Graham Kings' verse displays depth and devotional energy in ways that bring to mind Christian Wiman, Malcolm Guite, James Matthew Wilson, Maryann Corbett and the other best religious poets of our day. It is a book you will want to share with the people who mean the most in your life.'

Nourishing Connections

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Nourishing Connections

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Beloved theologian and bishop Graham Kings has been writing poetry for thirty-five years, with many of his poems used in retreats and preaching throughout the Anglican Communion. This collection brings together Graham's poems on a range of devotional subjects.

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