Word Hoard

"Word-hoard" is, as I recall, the Anglo-Saxon kenning equivalent to "vocabulary" in modern English. This month's update is something of a hoard itself and this update is the hoardings for it. We begin with a hoard of five poems from Alabama Literary Review, including "Catullans" which is indeed about a hoarder. We continue with two essays that hoard, in the sense of gather and treasure together the work of poets old and new. In The New Criterion I attempt to sum up the achievement of T.S. Eliot, that hoarder of other poets' best lines, and in Religion and Liberty, I discuss the career in poetry of the writer and editor Joseph Bottum, who is himself a hoarder of lost things, including Neo-Latin. If you have made it through these redundancies, then stick around long enough to click the icons and read the hoards. Please note that the ALR portfolio of poems will open as a pdf. The complete issue will be published online in the month ahead, but I'm sharing my portion here and now.

My next book, Catholic Modernism and the Irish "Avant-Garde," the result of almost two decades (off and on) of research will appear this fall from Catholic University of America Press. I am currently in discussion with publishers and look forward to seeing through the press my next book of poems, Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds​.

Five New Poems

T.S. Eliot's Still Point

The Neo-Latinate Imagination of Joseph Bottum