Articles

IT HAD BEEN a church once, no, had been a home for the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is the name she finds stamped on the inside of the missal. In the vestry, off the small chapel in back, she finds a pair of candlesticks inside of a drawer, along with the…

The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, a silent chorus of white-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them, child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Leaves of the eucalyptus multiply and your solicitous murmurings sound like…

They, too, have stood, smitten and bemused, angered at the violence of kings, caught between a rock and the roiling ocean, between the glimpsed shadow of a retributive deity and the gentle features of he-who-is-to-come; they would fasten down the voice they hear calling to them, though they know there is no voice, only that…

THERE WAS a great blackened pan being eased out of the greasy oven by a tiny old woman in padded oven gloves. No one in the crowded kitchen—yellow walls, hideous mess, marijuana smoke and incense—came forward to help her. But someone, a joker, called out “What is it this time, Scottie? One of your concoctions?”…

The following is an expanded version of the introductory remarks delivered at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27, 2009. The theme for both the workshop and Image’s twentieth anniversary year, now concluding, was “Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense.” BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of…

The International Issue (#65) includes poetry in translation from Russian, Latvian, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We asked the translators who contributed work to the issue about how they see their art: What’s the value of reading poetry in translation? That is, if we’re not really hearing the sounds and rhythms of the poet’s original…

If Penetrated by Light: Five Poets Consider the Darkness The Fortieth Day by Kazim Ali (BOA Editions, 2008) Astonishment: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska ——-Translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon (Paraclete Press, 2007) The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado ——-Translated by Ellen Watson (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) Hovering at a…

So little was the warrior, how she held out her slimmed down arms to the flowers I carried and to all that which crumbled in such a theatrical New York evening she was lovely and bright, drinking the last of the champagne to avoid that burning in her throat— And she raised her clear eyes…

In the dark I inflate balloons ———————————for my children it’s nighttime in the house ——————————-I lose my breath, they grow their aerial games, ———————-the threads on which they become acrobats their water shins luminescent hair ———————-their laughter issues forth or holds off, paper decorations on the walls, and the colors, loose folds on their wrists,…

Love at its start and at its finish is not a sentiment ————–but in your arrival a restless fury, eye of cyclones, the dream of a fossilized gaze smashed under amber arrangement of stars in the air and on your face— each step a last judgment. Sentiments change, but not the struggle between the life…