Since 2006 I've written seven Christmas poems of a narrative nature: four of them recounting different persons' ... I'd like to present two of these: about the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph.

Ah, come here ‘til I tell you, I saw them. Round, young Mary, with Joseph, asleep outside Liberty Hall on a cardboard bed, in sleeping bags and hooded winter coats.

Mary Oliver's Felicity (Penguin Press, $24.95), forthcoming next month, is a breezy, inviting collection of love poems that celebrates the divine as much as it does the natural world or human ...