I love the broad strokes and sweeping vision of this poem at the same time as I appreciate its specificity, its impressive attention to detail. The forces of good and evil that make up the archetypal beams of this poem create a kind of structural backdrop against which the poem whirs and sparks— from the…

Memories can make good material for poetry. In “The Spirit of Promise,” Daniel Donaghy is remembering his Catholic childhood in the particular church that he’s now re-visiting. At first the poet’s memories are negative: “my grade-school nuns shaking // their heads at me”; the priest “putting down his Chesterfield / to tell me how many…