Christmas at St Mary Woolnoth

St. Mary Woolnoth

My last update spoke of the poetry of autumn. This one finds us barely past the beginning of the Christmas Season and the people of West Michigan sunk beneath about thirty inches of snow, all raising its brilliant and silent hymn of glory. As we mark these joyous feast days, we recall also another anniversary, the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. St. Mary Woolnoth is the historic Anglican Church in central London that sits opposite Lloyd's Bank. During Eliot's years at the Bank, he would visit that parish and its consolation and summoning to the life of the spirit would be memorialized in his great modernist poem.

The homily for the Second Sunday of Advent moved me to write an essay on Yvor Winters. And the feast of the North American Martyrs led to my commission to write a poem in their memory. Look below to find those three items. Click the icons to read them. Click still another to read Patrick Kurp's review of The Strangeness of the Good.

And scroll even farther down, if you would like to see my public conversations with Dana Gioia and Robert Royal. One took place during the Summer Literary Series at the University of Saint Thomas, where my MFA program had gathered for its annual residency. The other took place at the Napa Institute, in late July.

I will have a further special announcement soon, regarding my books, but in the meantime, click and enjoy these free items. I hope they somehow enrich this season of new birth for all of you.

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"The Waste Land at 100"

Stay Awake: Death, Catholicism, and Yvor Winters

"In Memory of the North American Martyrs"

Patrick Kurp reviews "The Strangeness of the Good"