More on: Essays

IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…

IMAGE HAS ALWAYS embraced the idea that art often speaks better than argument, and that seems especially true in times of grief. For this issue, we’ve chosen to print a poem rather than a traditional editorial. As the Image board and staff search for a new editor, we and our community are in a state…

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…

WE WATCHED DAVID make his way slowly down the middle of the street, dragging his right leg, his right arm limp at his side. With his left hand, he reached forward with his cane and lurched after it. A plastic grocery bag hung from his left wrist. Step and drag, forward and pause, all effort…

CLAIRE CURNEEN STARTS EACH of her sculptural ceramic works in the same way, with a small piece of clay. Squeezing it between her fingers, pushing and pressing it into the palm of her hand, she flattens it into a small disc. These discs are the building blocks of her figures. By pressing and squeezing them…

BECAUSE IT HAS BEEN A STAPLE of the high school classroom, it is nearly impossible to approach The Scarlet Letter with the sort of wonder and respect it deserves. Somber and at times melodramatic, The Scarlet Letter is an altogether quieter book than, say, Moby Dick, which can make it feel tame by comparison. But…

ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 20, 2016, I felt a subtle pinch in my upper torso, right side. My wife and I were at our remote cabin in Washington County, Maine, where, among other things, despite my seventy-three years, I’d been training for a local twelve-mile paddle race. I felt fitter than I had in…

AS A CHILD growing up on the island of Jamaica, it seemed to me that people, especially women, were always singing hymns as they went about their business. Women bending low over washtubs, or standing knee deep in swift-running rivers, would produce scrub rhythms from the friction of soaped cloth rubbed hard between fists, and…

There is another world, but it is within this one.                                         —Paul Éluard I LIKE TO SING. Singing, like poetry, enables us to enter experiences other than our own. I sing lively Elizabethan songs by Thomas Campion, melancholy ones by John Dowland, gems from Shakespeare’s plays, “Greensleeves,” and the medieval “Cherry Tree Carol” in which…

IN ASSISI, THE SKY vaults clouded and serene against the foothills. *   Pietro, known as Francesco, devoted brother of his order, put quill to thirteenth-century parchment and began to praise. His inspiration was Psalm 148, whose Hebrew exhortations spur the sun and moon, the stars and highest heavens, tempests and mountains and wingèd birds…