May the poem, grasped and penned, be the Grail
sustaining hearts healed for a spell
Poetry
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
James Dickey, America’s ‘bare-chested bard’
James Dickey’s public persona of fighter pilot, champion athlete and hard-drinking woodsman who wrote of “country surrealism” gave him an everyman appeal, even as he was perhaps the nation’s greatest poetic talent.
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
Lament
Though it felt wrong to sleep, I slept,
and when I woke and remembered, I wept.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
A sense of wonder: Remembering Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle’s essays, fiction and poetry all offered powerful reflections on finding the beautiful and the divine amid life’s struggles.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Seamus Heaney lost his Catholic faith. But his poetry still sought transcendence.
Ten years after his death, commentators and admirers of Seamus Heaney are still looking for new ways to measure his life and work.
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
Homily: For Christians, no one is a foreigner
Living under the reign of sin, they are still a necessary bulwark, nation-states to see them as God’s will for humanity is to blaspheme the one who knows no bounds.
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
Apology for Belief
I tell my familiars
everything but need to scream my head off
in a Bible cocoon
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Joyce Kilmer: soldier, writer and lost voice in the American Catholic literary revival
Among the 53,000 Americans killed in World War I was Joyce Kilmer, a distinguished poet and essayist who died in battle at the age of 31.
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
Building a world and inviting us in: the 2023 Foley poetry contest
I am grateful for all the poets who submitted their work for the contest. Every year we get poems from all over the United States, and even across the world, about any number of topics.