Books
The Yearning Life: Poems
Phyllis Tickle Prize in Poetry. (Paraclete Press, 2016)
“Regina Walton’s magnificent first collection of poetry, The Yearning Life, ceaselessly circles around the dream of perfection and its simultaneous impossibility. The book pulls the reader back and forth between the urge toward ascesticism and a celebration of the world’s overflowing bounty.”
ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER, Anglican Theological Review
“With a lover’s attention to the beloved, Regina Walton attends with both yearning and delight to the world at hand, apprehending the promise of that world’s subtle but sure connection to the Love that moves all things. Here we find the seeker’s hard-won wisdom made all the more compelling by joy and vertiginous expectation.”
SCOTT CAIRNS, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems
“Winner of the first Phyllis Tickle Prize in Poetry, Regina Walton offers poems that range from lighthearted to profound. Her seven meditations on the O Antiphons ponder what it means to call Jesus a key, a root, wisdom. ‘Come Emmanuel: you who ate and wept and walked. . . . / Given, you cannot be unspoken.’”
ELIZABETH PALMER, The Christian Century
“So much delight and wit and intelligence and, yes, love here in Regina Walton’s The Yearning Life. Here is a worthy successor to the great English Catholic metaphysicals, so much so that one feels a kind of blood kinship with another priest, George Herbert. How is it she finds so much for the yearning spirit to feast upon in a common housefly, or a fish rising to the surface from the salt sea, or in this spurned yet blessed mortal coil we all share in common, whether in the miracle of giving birth or being there for those about to die? Read her.”
PAUL MARIANI, author of The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens