A brief word of thanks for an old collection of poems by Scott Cairns. Twenty years has passed since the first publication of Recovered Body, a small collection of Cairns’ poetry. It doesn’t have the warmth of some of his later work, (despite the passionate interludes with Erato, the muse), but it is fun to […]
Mary Oliver gave me a great gift, though it only came after her death in January. I had often heard her name in sermons and with hushed awe among my tribe at the Festival of Faith and Writing. But I always thought her a bit too tame. She wrote a book on dogs! How domestic! […]
‘Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.’ —Mary Oliver, ‘Everything That Was Broken’ Poets are not being imprecise when they finger God with other names. It’s just that they’re gobsmacked at the plenitude of Her appearances. In a lover or a creature or a wind-sparked memory or a laden scent, She […]
“Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word ‘soul.’” (xxxvii) Last year two books from Christian Wiman made their way to my reading stand. If nothing else had happened in the literary world in 2018, those two works would have been enough. […]
A plumb line drops (I know not where) by which feral cats are judged and marked ‘outside the bounds.’ I always saw their resistance to compassion as a noble trait along with their intemperate hisses at attempts to conquest. Feral, yes, but less skulky than the shark with its fin erect and its teeth […]
I once heard Paul Escamilla give a sermon in which he talked about a family cemetery in the Southwest borderlands. It was so rich that I felt I was walking the grounds with him, lingering over memories and sensing a deeper Spirit, one that binds us together across boundaries of time and space. Yesterday I […]
At the 2016 United Methodist General Conference in Portland, Oregon, I watched a group of children playing in a fountain and was moved to write a poem about the struggle my church was going through. I still hold on to the dream that we can breathe again as the 2019 Called General Conference convenes in […]
I decided to spend a year with Wendell Berry. He spent 33 with me, walking the circuits of his Kentucky River valley farm on a Sunday, sharing the fruit of his Sabbath poems written between 1979 and 2012. What I’m saying is that it was a slow year. I received This Day: Collected & New […]
Grey goblin of a morning, raining on my parade, What fancies do you offer as a token substitute? Or should I expect the dim return of my dark shadows? Depression and all its nearer kin? Not today. –Alex Joyner
What the older brother squandered was his sweat, which, had he known it was as dissolute as life in the far country, might have traded out for something more exciting. But his fierce integrity to the American dream was his particular delusion. “Virtue can be earned in honest labor.” Only honesty was not his aim. […]
