A Blessed Big Day

Book excerpt: A Blessed Big Day brings together more than fifty years of Ralph Brown's Christmas poems. These poems arise from a variety of places, cultures and circumstances. But while the subject matter of these verses spans the globe from villages of southern Pakistan to the woods of Royalston, Massachusetts, and ranges across an emotional scale from exhilaration to deep pain, they all reflect the transcendent joy, faith and reverence of an author who knows Jesus as God Incarnate, and who can write with confidence: If Christmas means what one can do Or is shaped by good health or clime Then the essence of Christmas remains With man and the fortunes of time. These poems also testify to an American poetic tradition, a tradition fading but still alive, which treats poetry not just as the property of literary professionals, but also as an expression of the every day lives, thought and experience of ordinary people. This is the tradition reflected in Best Loved Poems of the American People, and like that anthology, Ralph Brown's poems, often written hastily in the midst of the demands of work and circumstances, encourage us to keep alive the work of the everyday "rhymester."