Memories can make good material for poetry. In “The Spirit of Promise,” Daniel Donaghy is remembering his Catholic childhood in the particular church that he’s now re-visiting. At first the poet’s memories are negative: “my grade-school nuns shaking // their heads at me”; the priest “putting down his Chesterfield / to tell me how many decades // of the rosary I’d need to say.” Then he recalls his parents in church: a softer memory, which however ends in their deaths... Read more
It’s hard to imagine that anyone would look back on this period of American history as entertainment, but they’re bound to, I expect. Read more
By Nick Olson It’s been nearly a month since I finally saw Scorsese’s Silence, and what I remember most is the cry of cicadas and how crucial sound is to the film’s translation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel. The cicadas’ song is loud, and in Silence, they sound a sorrowful note. We hear the cicadas and the crickets before we see anything onscreen. When the title screen appears, there is an abrupt cut to silence. The cue is helpful because we’ve... Read more
When I went to seminary, there was concern. Friends whispered. Had I gone rogue? Or worse: been “saved”? Would I suddenly start dropping things like washed in the blood into regular conversation? Admittedly, the calling to serve the church was sudden and powerful, like lightning. I had always considered myself a Christian, even if I didn’t attend worship. But the closest thing I got to church during those years in North Carolina was dating the daughter of an Assemblies of... Read more
Why is it that we so often gain courage or cowardice to do bad from other members of a group, but seldom the courage to do good? Why is it that the herd instinct kicks in mostly when the object is to tear something to shreds, like beasts? Or when we’re put in fear by a despot and cannot dare to be different from the rest of the craven lot who cower in the shadows, too terrified to stare him... Read more
The emotional landscape of motherhood can often be hard to describe and is underrepresented in genres such as poetry. As a poet and mother of a two-year old with a new baby on the way, I appreciated “Rain” by Tara Bray and found it very instructive on several levels. In this candid poem, a “family of flight” rests at a truck stop. The mother, still awake, observes her sleeping husband and daughter and affectionately compares them to birds, husband as... Read more
The love of God is scattershot. It is the love of the artist toward her work or the girl toward her spiders. Read more
What would you think of a biography of a famous person written in the form of a poem? I don’t mean just a portrait of the person: Stephanie Strickland did this (masterfully) in her The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil. No, I mean a full, chronological biography—birth to death and reputation beyond—complete with socio-political context and analysis of the subject’s inner life as well as his public achievements. And even more: a biography that becomes at the same... Read more
Flocking to rural life and simple living can be just as much an attempt to avoid the darkness as binge-watching a TV show. Read more
The cabin where my husband and I are having a weekend getaway is on the border of Wisconsin, on the lip of a rustic lake where two canoes stick out of the water like discolored buckteeth. They are tipped upside down at the crook of a thin tilted dock. When my husband turns one of them over for us to take a ride, the sharp edge of the canoe scoops the cold lake water into its base. At thirty weeks... Read more
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