When I read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to a group, I generally start by saying, “Don’t worry about getting it all on first hearing. Just let the words flow over you and see how you feel.” That’s how I started on him, though tremendously helped by a book in the Augsburg Fortress 40 Day […]
“As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. (178)” –Kathleen Norris, Dakota Returning to Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography almost three decades after it was written, I tried to decide what made it so powerful for me when I was a […]
A few more words for Christian Wiman. As if my words for Joy, (an edited collection of poems), and He Held Radical Light, (a memoir), and Survival is a Style, (a personal collection of poems), have not been enough to convince you that he’s a writer worth savoring. Seeking more I went back to his […]
“Take away the words to the song and hope will take up humming;” I’m not sure how the Rev. Paul Escamilla wrote those words on his manuscript before delivering them in a sermon some some weeks ago. There’s usually a little poetry in sermons, even if you’re not aiming for that old sermon structure of […]
Like Jesmyn Ward at #3, Christian Wiman is a three-time visitor to the annual Best Reads list, having been here in 2018 for his exquisite memoir, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art, and in 2019 as editor of the collection, Joy: 100 Poems. In 2020 Wiman published a solo […]
I like to keep a magical writer by my morning reading chair. For a few blessed months this year and last it was Brian Doyle, whose brief essays in the collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder sing. His observations have the attention of a nature writer and the lilt of an Irishman […]
“I would have nothing against calling my anthology a book of enchantments.” (xx) –Czeslaw Milosz Czesław Milosz not only has a difficult name for English speakers to get their tongues around, his poetry is also difficult. But in 1996 he edited a collection of poems that is full, as he says in the introduction, “of […]
Just as the world shut down last March, Paraclete Press released a small chapbook of new poems by Scott Cairns, A School of Embodied Poetics: New Poems. Cairns is a Heartlands favorite and we’ve checked in on several of his earlier collections, most recently the luminous Anaphora. He invites settled and repeated reading, something that […]
I’ve got no objectivity when it comes to Laurence Wareing. I’ll just say that up front. Even though I believe I’d be celebrating the appearance of Celtic Blessings and Celtic Saints into the world without knowing who the author was, I do recognize that knowing the soul behind the books made the reading that much […]
The greatest freedom is not to be found ahead—-in the land of what comes next. It’s not what we can slide into when we get past the moment we’re in. Because when the future gets here it will be the present and just as burdened by the expectation that the better day is the one […]
