Feeding of the Multitude, detail from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, via Wikimedia Commons Poetry and Humility Last weekend I was invited to speak at a small online conference for Catholic writers. The aim of the Good Discourse conference...
All Through the Night: Night Poems and Lullabies edited by Marie Heaney When Dom had to go into the hospital for some tests, I found myself stranded in the hospital waiting room with the ubiquitous television’s relentless beating, with talk...
I’ve been swept into a general Heaney retrospective quite by chance. My friend Sally Thomas rediscovered his book of essays, Finder’s Keepers, on her shelf and started sharing tidbits, little nibbles of passages that caught her eye. I realized, “I...
The Borrowed House, Hilda van Stockum’s juvenile novel about World War II, opens with a German girl collecting eggs in a barn when the farmwife orders her to kill a chicken for dinner. Janna cannot do it. How could she kill a creature that has a...
Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s...
