The Ordering of Love

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 give readers permission to glimpse into her spirit and gain new insights into their own.

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 writes. "And then it is written to be shared." Open-hearted and vulnerable, The Ordering of Love reflects on themes of love, loss, faith, and beauty as she crafts her compelling wisdom into the language of the heart.

Praise for The Ordering of Love

"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