A Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Terrance Klein

Whenever I teach a seminar on T. S. Eliot’s work, I spend the first day of class on ‘Marina.’

My writing during these past five years is filled with memories of my long journey with God over a lifetime; but very significantly, it is the expression of my prayer at this later time of my life.

In 'Requiem,' her fifth book, Virginia Konchan takes the sacred seriously. She’s jocular with her subjects, including God, yet in doing so she demonstrates sustained attention toward the divine. God is among her natural poetic vocabulary.

Two new books give a multi-hued portrait of Seamus Heaney as he pursued a late-20th-century vocation as a public advocate of poetry and as a somewhat private advocate of Catholicism as a folk culture.

These are poems that grip your heart, stretch your mind and startle your soul awake.