Nancy Mackenzie

Communion continues the spiritual and philosophical explorations of Soul’s Flight and The Illuminated Life by playing chords, taking down dictation from the muse, imagination and soul––through old and emerging disciplines––to feel resonance not only with ancestors’ dreams but also with the poet’s place in the world. In doing so, Communion recognizes ancient doctrine in modern faiths. The poems reach for the divine by charting soul’s migration from willow fen to farmyard, out to the cosmos, back in through the Earth, to a raven or mountain for voicing again its search for communion with the divine.
The poems, inspired and helped along by Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus, archetypes and shamanism, bring more than wine and bread, blood and body to the practice of communion. Through free verse, sestina, and glosa, Communion is a river, a tête-à-tête with the dead, a watchman at the gate, a horse, and an image of the world where words build a bridge––corpus pontiflex––between God and humans.

Rising in the shade of Wendell Berry’s meditations on the earth and human dependency, Nancy Mackenzie’s poems, holding “echoes / part eternal part pure now,” move effortlessly toward that communion beyond but still enfolding the “stolen habitat,” reminding the reader that poetry begins and ends in prayer. For those who “want to see God,” these poems take us to the heart of life, bounded by angels and remembered prairies, family lives beginning and ending, and “throaty summer women.”
E. D. Blodgett

Like Nancy Mackenzie’s ancestors, we pull up our chairs to her hearth, drawn in by the fire and clarity of her spirit and her words. Here is a poet who offers us not only the wild and the raven, but a glass of the finest, purest river.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Nancy Mackenzie lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Communion is Nancy’s third book of poetry.