The New Joan, and Other Poems

Written during the First World War, Katherine Hale's collection imagines Joan of Arc reborn not as a warrior on the battlefield, but as a spiritual force stirring within the women of a new era. The title poem traces a soldier's soul returning through centuries to find its luminous mate again that joyful light which dark spaces fill when the called-upon spirit walks the earth once more. These are poems of sacrifice and endurance, where women's labor and love become acts of creation as profound as any battle. Hale weaves together the sacred and the domestic, the mythological and the immediate, rendering wartime devotion not as patriotism alone but as something closer to mystical vocation. The collection moves between elegy and exultation, mourning what is lost while insisting on renewal. For readers who find in poetry a way to understand how courage transforms across centuries, how the flame that drove one woman to Rouen might kindle in another tending a farm or holding a family together through war's long shadow, this collection offers that rare thing: verse that makes the ancient feel urgently present.