The Ordering of Love - (Writers' Palette Book) by Madeleine L'Engle (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the beloved author of A Wrinkle in Time comes the definitive edition of her inspirational and timeless poetry, featuring more than 200 original poems, a new Foreword by Sarah Arthur, and a new reader's guide by Lindsay Lackey.

Madeleine L'Engle's writing has always translated the invisible, quiet corners of our hearts into a vivid, stunning experience. Her fiction invites readers into new universes while her spiritual memoirs unveil the tenderness and resilience of the human spirit.

In her poetry, L'Engle's craft proves just as striking, as she traverses the full breadth of the soul with her words, intimately exploring the contours of hope, doubt, and love. "It is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words," she says of her poetry. "And then it is written to be shared." Open-hearted and vulnerable, The Ordering of Love is a meditation on beauty, loss, faith, and devotion.

"A prayerful and powerful portrait of a writer who served her work, and served it well. May we strive to do the same." --Sarah Arthur, from the Foreword

Review Quotes

"In a brilliant marriage of myth and manner, histories sacred and profane, prayers of petition and of praise, these poems both articulate and illumine the trouble in the gap in which we live-the gap between human affections and Divine Love. L'Engle is unfailing in her willingness to see through-not around-human suffering, and in so doing announces no final severing of spirit and flesh but an enduring vision of resurrection in that crux, in the cross, in the One in Whom all things meet, continuing."--Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim and Philokalia: New and Selected Poems

"I love L'Engle's poetry for the way it incarnates not only the great Truths of the faith, but all the little truths of our ordinary existence-our working and playing and loving and fighting and dreaming and idling and all the rest of it-and for the way it shows us that those big and little truths should not, cannot, be separated."--Carolyn Arends, recording artist and author

"Why is L'Engle one of the defining poets of our time? Because when life hurts, she does not shrink from the wounds. She clarifies the murk with hope as we feel the lift of grace."--Calvin Miller, Beeson Divinity School

"We are, all of us, the richer for this carefully crafted and prayerfully rendered collection."--Phyllis Tickle, author of The Divine Hours

About the Author

Madeleine L'Engle was the author of more than fifty books for all ages, among them the beloved A Wrinkle in Time, awarded the Newbery Medal; A Ring of Endless Light, a Newbery Honor Book; and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, winner of the National Book Award. L'Engle was named the 1998 recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring her lifetime contribution in writing for young adults. She served as the librarian and writer in residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine for over twenty years. Madeleine L'Engle died in September 2007, at the age of eighty-eight.