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Telemachus to Odysseus
When my mother turned seventy a year and a half ago, the occasion coincided with my rotation in the Good Letters blog. My post to mark the milestone was titled "Telemachus to Penelope," the title of a poem I had written for my mother in the wake of her divorce from my father after thirty-three years of marriage. My poem, inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s “Odysseus to Telemachus” and written soon after....
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The Subjective Correlative
The American painter Washington Allston wrote of the objective correlative a good seventy years before T.S. Eliot (“mature poets steal”) made it his own. And while I have no aim here to steal from or imitate Eliot (the path of “immature poets”), recently in matters of faith I have found a helpful cousin to his trope—“the subjective correlative.” I’m still not exactly sure how to define it....
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A Very Good Friday
Earlier this week, I was deep in the weeds at work when the shadow of a deadline for my next Good Letters post began creeping over me. “I’ve got you down for Good Friday,” our long-suffering editor, Greg Wolfe, noted in a friendly nudge on Monday, before I got around to asking him exactly when my post was due. “Don’t feel you have to write about Good Friday,” he added. Oh, but I do....
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Farewell to Carefree
Not long after my grandmother died in the fall of 2008, a secondary grief loomed with possibility in the uncertain distance: the prospect of one day having to sell the house that for over thirty years until this past weekend was a sacred family refuge in the charming desert hamlet of Carefree, Arizona. Yes, Carefree. No, I’m not joking. (People often assume this is the case.) But if the town itself lives up to....
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Farther Along
The last time my brother gave me such an imperative toward buying a new album it was upon the release of U2’s Achtung Baby. I could write a post or two about the ripple effect of that purchase down to this very day twenty years later, but it’s the recent imperative regarding Josh Garrels’ Love & War & the Sea in Between that concerns me here. The difference in the first case was that of course I had heard of U2....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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