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poetry 49

Lovely, Dark, and Deep

The one observation on which all the Brothers focused with most interest, though, was what I might describe as the words beyond words. These poems are not just about a…
April 29, 2025

Where Can Wisdom Be Found? -Gambling Pigeons, the Quest for Wisdom, and the Irreducibility of Poetry

Poetry must be experienced, and the experience of poetry is itself a means of searching, a kind of hunting, for wisdom.

Ode to Gettysburg at 161

To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.

At Home with James Matthew Wilson  

However, in St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of…

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Grief

Her work is certainly redolent of sorrow and, as she describes it, the eternity that dwells within her. But her words also carry hope and surprising faith that she will…

The Epic England Never Had: A Review of eÞanðun

But I reckon that eÞanðun can mix with Beowulf and Paradise Lost and not feel out of place.

Working for the Life Beyond Words

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem…

Bewilderment My Bow: A Review of Zero at the Bone

How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them…
Jeffrey Bilbro
February 2, 2024

Nostalgia, Longing, and Christmas Joy “In the Bleak Midwinter”

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first heard it at a high school friend’s Christmas concert…

The Falconer

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more…
December 4, 2023

Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940

While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…

Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God–Break, Blow, Burn, and Make New: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Re-Members the Poetic as an Opportunity to Consider Redemption

Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…

A Conversation with Katy Carl on Place, Fiction, and Contemplation

Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…

Invitations to Dwell

We soaked in the morning and our coffee, aware that we were technically trespassing. But, at the moment, we felt the weight of heritage, a complicated term that outmatched the…

Dana Gioia’s Bright Twilight

Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.”

Samson-Oak: A Review of The Common Misfortunes of Everyday Plants

Nature is never pure in these poems; it is always responding to human care or lack-of-care, commodified, and, indeed, turned into a symbol by the poet herself. Emerson doesn't hide…

Paterson and Poetic Fidelity

Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such…

The This-ness of This Place: Introducing Belle Point Press and Mid/South Anthology

Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our…

Farming as Poetical: Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry on Agriculture’s Poetical Form

Poetry is the creative ordering of words to bring forth the fruits of the human heart and intellect. The poet is called to lose himself, so to speak, in listening…

Dos Passos: The Modernist Path That Wasn’t

We have lost something of great value in forgetting the work of John Dos Passos. He was a man who knew who deserved his sympathy, and his work followed his…
March 7, 2022

“unsafe, unnumb”: The Unshod Poetry of Bower Lodge

This is poetry that focuses its readers on the true, good, and beautiful. Here, we are reminded that Christ took on flesh like ours, that he was born as we…

Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech…
John Murdock
November 23, 2021

Fallen From Eden: Reading the Poetry of Catullus

Catullus is not a saint. He is not a moral poet. But his crudity and madness still dance with the shadows of truth and echo with the cry of the…

Living In the Myth: A Review of Jason Stacy’s Spoon River America

Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern…