The Ragged Psalmist

The Ragged Psalmist is a contemporary psalter of 150 poems in conversation with the ancient Psalms, written by Canadian poet and Benedictine Oblate Stephen T. Berg. For over twenty-five years he has begun his mornings by reading through the Psalter each month: "It's a crap way to start the day. And it's a marvelous way. I hate the Psalms. I love the Psalms." This long, uneasy devotion becomes the deep well from which these poems rise.

Framed by Joy Harjo's reminder that "the spirit is vulnerable and needs to be fed with tenderness and songs" and the promise of Psalm 138:3, "On the day I called, you answered me; you increased my strength of soul," the book moves between prayer and protest, praise and bewilderment. Berg does not explain the Psalms; he lets them collide with his own life-family, illness, politics, nature, and the daily work of staying human.

Each poem is paired with a psalm text and becomes a lived response. In "Dogwood," he imagines himself not as a mighty oak of righteousness but as a spindly tree by a barbed-wire fence, feeling the pastor's words "like flint" hitting his heart. In "A Savage and Beautiful Truth," he sits with his transgender son's long suffering and discovers, within agony, an "ever-present, suffering Love" that breaks through his "rolodex of resentments" and "permafrost anger."

Berg's voice is often wry and playful. "Resentment" becomes a comic parable in which sulking swells into a catastrophic snowball that floods a town and inadvertently births a desert saint. In "I Want to be a Pharmacy," he imagines a 24-hour apothecary staffed by "rainbow-bloused angels," dispensing "oil of gladness, edible sunrises, musicians-in-bottles," and even sunglasses that show a merciful, filter-free self.

The book is also sharply attentive to the world's wounds. "The Lord's Prayer and the Department of War" juxtaposes children's bodies on the border of Gaza with a slick military video set to the Lord's Prayer, asking what it means to invoke God while normalizing violence. Elsewhere, Berg writes of poverty, war, racism, and ecological grief, always returning to mercy, empathy, and the stubborn dignity of ordinary people.

Nature threads through the collection as revelation: winter trails, dogwoods, whisky jacks, frost on a loft window, desert light. In "Shine On," moon and starlight fall on a child's chores and an elder's "bins full of memories," suggesting that every life, however small or ragged, is held in a larger radiance.

The Ragged Psalmist will resonate with readers of spiritual memoir, poetry, and contemplative writing; with those who love and mistrust religion in equal measure; and with anyone who suspects that faith, if it is to be honest, must make room for doubt, grief, humour, and the fierce, ordinary work of love.