Ninety-five-year-old American Catholic poet Marie Ponsot, inspired by Donne, Hopkins, Joyce, Beckett, and Djuna Barnes, remains to be discovered by UK readers.

Brooklyn-born, Ponsot graduated from that borough’s St Joseph’s College for Women in 1940 before studying seventeenth-century literature at the Columbia University graduate school. When the Second World War finished, she travelled to France and married the French painter Claude Ponsot, with whom she had seven children, most of them born after the couple’s return to America. When their marriage collapsed, she supported the family single-handedly, translating and adapting works by Paul Claudel, Henri Ghéon and Diego Fabbri for Catholic radio and television programmes. Obliviousness to what careerist Yankee poets call the “po biz” meant that after a brief initial collection, True Minds, was published in 1957, it would be another 25 years before another collection by Ponsot would appear. Meanwhile, she continued to write and publish, but it was not until her late seventies that significant career recognition arrived for this highly literate, metaphysical and non-beat poet.

Her Collected Poems is an abundant feast of lifelong concerns, among them her radical beliefs as a long-time follower of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement. The early “Communion of Saints: The Poor Bastard Under the Bridge,” expresses exultant miséri­corde for a hapless Parisian clochard who …