Tag: Poetry

  • The Midnight Diner & The United Methodist Church

    The Midnight Diner & The United Methodist Church

    We took the train by the river
 to see what prophets see

  • The Lightness of Abigail Carroll

    The Lightness of Abigail Carroll

    She has a knack for going to the deep and sometimes difficult heart of things without flinching and yet returning with something like uplift and joy. There is a lightness verging on flight to her images and words. And a reassuring faithfulness in her discipline of witness.

  • Christian Wiman Cuts Close to the Bone Again

    Christian Wiman Cuts Close to the Bone Again

    Here is a scrapbook, a glorious one, that dabbles in autobiography, poetry, biblical exegesis, and compendia of quotations from some of literature and spirituality’s greatest lights. Is it seamless? Far from it. But should you submit to the grim and magnificent ride? Absolutely.

  • The Headlong Poetry of Laura Martin

    “I know then that everything is fragile/and that everything does not have to last/to be eternal.” — Laura Martin

  • #6 – Fatal by Kimberly Johnson – 2022 Best Reads

    #6 – Fatal by Kimberly Johnson – 2022 Best Reads

    I’ve gushed about Kimberly Johnson’s poetry on this blog before. Called Johnson “one of our best living poets.” Noted that she is “the rare poet who consistently evokes for me the presence of the barely-cloaked divine.” Credited her with making me a daily reader of poetry. So when Johnson produced a new collection in 2022,…

  • #8 – Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell – 2022 Best Reads

    #8 – Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell – 2022 Best Reads

    Katherine Rundell is a scholar but she doesn’t write like one. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Rundell has made a name in children’s books, but with this biography she has brought to life one of the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan Age. And she has done it with a very light touch.…

  • #7–Braided Creek–2021 Best Reads

    #7–Braided Creek–2021 Best Reads

    If you’ve followed this Best Reads exercise before you know that a 2021 Best Read doesn’t have to have been a book published in 2021, although more recent books do get more weight in the discernment process. So far we’ve had three great 2021 books, but this one from 2003 had to make the list.…

  • #8–Saint Agnostica–2021 Best Reads

    #8–Saint Agnostica–2021 Best Reads

    “My poetry got a lot better,” Anya Krugovoy Silver told Macon Magazine in 2010. “Nothing focuses your mind and helps you see clearly what’s important quite like cancer. It made me want to explore, even more, the beauty and divinity of the ordinary world.” The breast cancer diagnosis came in 2004 when she was in…

  • The Light Along Braided Creek

    The Light Along Braided Creek

    Short poems can seem light, slight…a thrown-off thought, a casual aside. But leave the world of nursery rhymes and limericks and there are wonders to behold in a few well-chosen lines. That was my experience reading the collection of poems in Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. In the midst of a serious illness, U.S.…

  • Touching Snakes in Stanley Kunitz’s Garden

    Touching Snakes in Stanley Kunitz’s Garden

    Stanley Kunitz was well into his nineties when Genine Lentine collaborated with him on a luminous book about poetry and gardening. The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden came out in 2005 and it includes interviews Lentine did with Kunitz, mostly about his long-tended garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s a…