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.

proclaiming This is God loving me, even in defeat.

Though it felt wrong to sleep, I slept,      and when I woke and remembered, I wept.

Brian Doyle's essays, fiction and poetry all offered powerful reflections on finding the beautiful and the divine amid life’s struggles.

Ten years after his death, commentators and admirers of Seamus Heaney are still looking for new ways to measure his life and work.

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.