Soul Songs: A Strand of Praise

By Gunilla Norris. Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2025. 104 pages. $22.95/paperback or eBook.

Sprinkled throughout Gunilla Norris’s latest book of poems, Soul Songs, are small drawings of beads that reflect the first lines in the book’s introduction:

Sometimes in deep quiet a few words will come
as if a bead were dropped into my hands,
something to hold and experience.

“Beads” is an apt metaphor for these poems, which like mala or rosary beads become burnished and laden with meaning each time they are held in the hand. For me, they bring to mind the experience of holding and sharing a message in meeting for worship: something, perhaps, of few words but expansive and resonant, holding the promise of new insight for those who hear them.

Soul Songs reflects a solid grounding in the practice of Quaker worship, as well as a deep familiarity with Christian mystics (epigraphs heading the three untitled sections of the book quote Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Hildegard of Bingen respectively). Norris, who has been published in Friends Journal, has worshiped with Westerly (R.I.) Meeting for several years; previously, she worshiped with New London (Conn.) Meeting.

Many of these new poems address the Deity directly, “You are the one / yearning / inside us and / beside us,” while others describe the poet’s individual perspective, but all focus on experiences that show how the intensely personal can lead to the Divine.

These poems, all untitled, do not announce but invite: sometimes in the softest of voices. They encourage the reader to slow down, silence the mind, pay attention to that which is beautiful and graceful in the world, and to seek divine guidance.

In Norris’s universe, that guidance comes, not in grandiose revelations but in the form of tiny and, at first glance, inconsequential images, such as delicate new life springing forth “[o]ut of the crack / in the concrete” or “the felled / and decimated tree”:

green,
audacious,
unabashed,
of no account
and yet real.

Another tells of an ordinary moment in a day when the poet knows “nothing” but senses something in:

the way
the morning fog
caresses the deep
green junipers
and wraps around
the mailbox . . .

Two lines later she compares truth with an unopened letter in a way that reminds this writer of the still, small voice that surprises the worshiper with new insights.

Norris grew up in Sweden, Argentina, and the United States. This is her fifth book of poetry. (Others include Learning from the Angel and Joy Is the Thinnest Layer.) She has also published more than a dozen books on the spirituality of the everyday, including a Pendle Hill pamphlet inspired by the historic Westerly Meetinghouse in Rhode Island, and a number of children’s books. Norris is a psychotherapist with a special interest in teaching meditation and contemplation workshops.

Rich in silences as well as images, these are the kind of poems that need to be read and savored slowly: one, two, or three at a time. They will be of interest to Friends as well as anyone interested in the spiritual life.

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Catherine Wald lives in New York City and worships at Morningside Meeting.