Jeanne Murray Walker was brought up a fundamentalist Baptist (for which she is still grateful), but she has become a seeking Anglican. Professor of English at Delaware University, she says of her poetic calling: 'You launch yourself off into some wild place that you've never been before. Maybe we all have to do that with our questions about our life and death, the ones that poetry has always talked about. Love-and-death is the underlying subject of great lyric poetry'.' She adds from her own point of view: 'What I mean is that, I think finally writing is an act of prayer, or certainly an act faith.' (From in Interview with Lucy Shaw in 'Image', Number 68).