Again to Port Soderick
By Poetry Issue 88
(from Hopkins’s journal of a vacation on the Isle of Man, August 1872) So much need in that “Again.” To see it in good weather. To look down again from the cliffs at the high water of a full tide. To hold the kaleidoscope of the waves to his eye and watch them churn and…
Read MoreBackyard Apotheosis
By Poetry Issue 88
All the way to heaven is heaven, Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly said, and on most days, replete with the stabbed, shot, run-over or into, the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken, I’d say bullshit and be done with it. But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming things up, I’m in shorts and a…
Read MoreListening Unfolding
By Essay Issue 88
Listening Unfolding: Notes on Ministry and Poetry 1. The carpeting in the living room is indeed wall to wall, and smells as musty as I remembered. But since my interview visit, someone has spread a tablecloth over the wing table in the living room and planted a sofa by the window, so that when…
Read MoreThe Lord Spoke to the Fish
By Poetry Issue 88
Jonah 2:10 I knew a whale in California who said it was a descendant of the great fish God prepared for Jonah. On the darkest nights when everyone felt alone, it told great stories of the great fish. Often, it would chuckle as it spoke of its ancestor. The young whales would honor it by…
Read MoreLevity and Gravity: The Sculpture of David Robinson
By Essay Issue 88
Sculpture is not made to function, but to make us function —Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy (1920–2006), __French figurative sculptor TEN YEARS HAD passed since I last saw David Robinson, the Vancouver-based Canadian sculptor. The occasion then was a studio visit to select three works for my exhibition A Broken Beauty: Figuration, Narrative, and Transcendence in North…
Read MoreNostalghia
By Poetry Issue 88
A meditation before the Madonna del Parto of Piero della Francesca 1. I speak to you, Lady, in words of my time still new as the boy’s laughter as he cut this morning’s bread. You sway a little, in the soft shadows where you dwell, like a boat painted inexpressibly blue. To speak of that…
Read MoreAnnie Spans the Gap
By Essay Issue 88
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination. What…
Read MoreMary
By Poetry Issue 88
If she had said, No, The world would not have stopped: Birds would have flown high still into sky, The heavens would have proclaimed his glory And the firmament the work of his hands. We would have gone on reproving him, Unaware of how deeply down His love might plunge into our affliction, Unaware of…
Read MoreKhaled Mattawa Interview
By Interview Issue 88
Khaled Mattawa on Adonis Our new issue includes Khaled Mattawa’s translation of “A Bridge to Job” by leading Syrian poet Adonis. We asked Mattawa to talk with us a little about Adonis’s work, the challenges of translation from Arabic, and what poetry in translation can uniquely offer us. This project is supported in part by…
Read MoreBent Body, Lamb
By Essay Issue 88
Really, though, I’m struggling. Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t even let me perform? What am I to make of all the parables in the New Testament where Jesus heals the crippled and the lame? And, most importantly, if I believe we’ll all eventually be resurrected back into the world, then is this body—this bruised, broken, wreck of a form—the one I’m stuck with for all time?
Read More