poetry 50
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…
A Comedy with a Sad Ending: #MeToo and Pope’s Rape of the Lock
Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense…
Remembering Our Names After the Fall
Rural Rebellion by Ross Benes, examines the changing politics of rural Nebraska from the perspective of a native son living in Brooklyn. Nebraska is a cycle of poems by Kwame…
Reading with Our Hearts: A Review of Enjoying The Bible
Enjoying the Bible is a book about beholding the deep riches of beauty in Scripture and allowing its literary elements to shape our humanity. A literary approach to Scripture teaches…
“Passionate in the Pursuit of Awe”: A Review of American Divine
In “American Divine,” it would seem that the pursuit is not so much a pursuit of divinity but rather the experience of it—the awe, which in this instance is private…
I’m Over the American Homer
I’m not canceling Whitman. But my own enthusiasm for his poetry is waning. The poet whose daring versification and daring lifestyle were once seen as the epitome of counter-culture has…
“Seventy Years Ago”: A Review of Red Stilts by Ted Kooser
Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.
Heighten the Mystery
With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?
Familiar Voices, Sacred Stanzas
What strikes me overall about The Slumbering Host is the open-heartedness, hopefulness, and steadfastness of the editors’ approach and selection. This is a collection that is true to itself and…
Exile as Resettlement: A Review of The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner…
They Stood On Their Feet
The poetry in this book captures some of those everyday moments and holds them up in a light that makes possible another kind of clarity, not that of simply worded…
The Bridge and the Breach: A Review of Indigenous by Jennifer Reeser
It is a hybrid, sacramental understanding of the earth and matter and of being in the world. She seems to say that even if the earth of Chilhowee is dry…
Learning to Read “the Book in Front of Us”
As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom. As a way of warding off…
Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia
In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the…
Absurd Wisdom: An Apology for Euthyphro
“Not many of you are wise, as men account wisdom…God chose those whom the world considers absurd to shame the wise.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27) The Philosopher and the Theologian The…
Donald Hall and the Unsettling of American Letters
When Donald Hall passed away last week the obituary in his local New Hampshire newspaper made clear what an exceptional and instructive life he had lived, one stirring in its…
Some Permanent Things In Print
In an endnote to The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot makes this categorical claim: Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline;…
Despair, Delight, and the Decentered Self
Berwyn, PA. The Fine Delight Interview Series with Catholic authors, conducted by the author of the book of the same name, Nick Ripatrazone, has just posted its latest interview --…
Craft First
As part of my recent visit to Hillsdale College, where I read from my forthcoming book, The Violent and the Fallen, I gave a short interview to the campus paper,…
A Footloose Spring Day
On a gorgeous April Wednesday I am filling in as substitute homeschool teacher. We do arithmetic; we do a language lesson about adverbs and Emily Dickinson. Then—did I mention the…
Poetry and the Common Language
This piece was originally posted at the University Bookman. Check out their site for other similar articles! --- If there is one principle which is nearly axiomatic among our contemporaries…
The Song of Taillefer
Somerset, NJ. Legend has it that on the field of Hastings, as the forces of the Conqueror ascended a hill to engage the exhausted army of Harold II, a certain…
Cowboy Poetry
An actual cowboy's life was a far cry from a John Wayne Western.
The Bar Jester’s Unpremeditated Verse
But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking…
