Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking: Poems

by Jeanne Murray Walker

Sonnets are familiar to us, but not relevant. What do they have to do with our fast-paced, tech-driven, ever-shrinking contemporary world? But what if the sonnet—invented 700 years ago—could come back like a cat with nine lives?  A sonnet in the twenty-first century might serve as a sacramental form, calling us from our work-mad lives to quietness and reflection.  
 
In  Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking , Jeanne Murray Walker invites the reader to join her on a journey told in 58 colloquial sonnets, beginning in the slangy streets of New York and ending in the holiness of silence and praise. Stops on the journey include reflections on death and grief, but also praise for a migrating butterfly, a knock on the door, the astonishing ocean.  This book is designed to be used as a devotional and read slowly; to be both a book of poetry and a spiritual companion.     
 

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published April 16, 2019

About the author

Jeanne Murray Walker's poems and essays have appeared in seven books as well as many periodicals, including Poetry, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Image, The Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Poetry. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in The Arts. She is Professor of English at The University of Delaware as well as a mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Low Residency MFA Program. In her spare time Jeanne gardens, cooks, and travels.

Reviews

[Marilyn McEntyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even those who already know and love Jeanne Murray Walker's poems, as I do, will be surprised by this lovely record of her "pilgrimage with sonnets." A reflective autobiographical introduction invites readers to remember the sonnets that have been most students' steppingstones through poetry, and then to imagine with her the sonnet as a form to be reclaimed and made new. She does that. Ringing changes on the familiar form, she both restores and makes it new in poems that evoke both the "ordinary moment on an ordinary day" Woolf wrote about and the extraordinary moments of loss that change everything. It's a journey worth taking slowly--one that might send some readers back to other sonnets--paths worth retracing.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was impressed with Walker’s poetry in the anthology “Christian Poetry in America since 1940,” so I decided to read one of her collections. This one this first one I came across. She writes beautiful sonnets, and I especially enjoyed those with overt Christian imagery and themes. I plan to read more of her work.

[Tina Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the idea of modern sonnets. These were ok. Perhaps, it just isn't my season to read these.

[Ruby Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the author's preface on her pilgrimage with the sonnet as much as the actual sonnets.

[Darlene Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful! I love the abstract-in-concrete, the way these poems are love letters to the details of the world. I greatly enjoyed seeing what Walker accomplished with the sonnet form. One of my favorite poetry reads of the year.