It’s one of those “Aha!” moments. I was reading an illustrated poem, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”) when I realized I’ve been long fascinated with mixing artistic genres.
I didn’t think this was some great personal revelation, but I was struck by how I tend to gravitate toward graphic treatments of classic or contemporary texts.
The work that included Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 was Nature Poems to See By by Julian Peters. It’s a collection of 24 classic nature poems, arranged by season (each with six), and illustrated with what is a literary comic strip.
When I think about Paul Revere, I think of two things. First, he made a famous ride. And second, he was a silversmith. He was also an engraver, and the Library of Congress Blogs has a post containing several of them.
Tim Challies has a thoughtful post about marriage. When you get married, you marry the whole person. If you see your spouse as a project, thinking in terms of improvement plans, you may have the wrong focus.
My wife and oldest son love the music of Rich Mullins. I will admit to a certain partiality myself. At Mere Orthodoxy, Songwriter and writer Andrew Peterson is interviewed about the singer who died almost 30 years ago.
We were in London in 2024, and I signed up for a London Open House tour that was right by our hotel. London Open House was a two-weekend event in which buildings not normally available to the public (or tourists) were open. Most, like this walking tour, required pre-registration.
The tour was fascinating. I had walked around these streets scores of times and never knew what had happened here. That rather ornate building around the corner – where Winston Churchill recorded all of his wartime addresses. That townhouse on a side street – the original building for the British Museum. That large stone mansion that backed to St. James’s Park – built by John D. Rockefeller as his London home. The rather nondescript office building across from the tube station – where Ian Fleming worked for MI-6 before he wrote the James Bond stories.
And right there, on a street named Petty France, was a Brutalist building housing the Ministry of Justice (it’s an ugly edifice; we call it the “Darth Vader Building”). At one corner is a small courtyard-like area. And right here, on this site, stood the house where then-blind poet John Milton (1608-1674) lived with his daughters and dictated the entirety of Paradise Lost. The only hint of this is the pub across the street, the one named the Adam and Eve.
Paradise Lost is one of the works that everyone wants to say they’ve read but hope no one asks for details. The fact is that it is one of the great works of English literature, cited by many as equal to or greater than Shakespeare and Chaucer. It’s also one of the greatest poems written in any language.
But as Alan Jacobs points out in Paradise Lost: A Biography, the work is also something else, a kind of cultural bellwether.
Watching kites in the sky. Bounding on a bed. A boy goes fishing. Washing clothes. A housemaid makes beds at a motel. Mowing a lawn. Adopting kittens. Veterans march in a Memorial Day parade.
Common, familiar activities and events. These are the kinds of things we do in our lives and work that become part of the background of daily life. We take them for granted. We smile at the memory. But politics and foreign policy and newspaper headlines and online viral sensations soon crowd them out. We pay more attention to our smart phones than to the real life happening around us. If we happen to look up and notice, we immediately start to think about new content for Instagram or TikTok.
In a very quiet and gentle way, poet Marjorie Maddox says look around. Her latest collection, Hover Here: Poems, should probably bear that as a subtitle. She doesn’t speak with loud or demanding images and words. That’s not her style, not to mention that loud and demanding soon crowds out understanding and reflection.
This past week marked the 250th anniversary of how the occupying British army suddenly evacuated Boston. On March 13, 1776, after having awakened to the shocking site of American cannon overlooking the city, The British started moving 9,000 troops, and a considerable number of Loyalists, to ships in the harbor. Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Revolutionary War Era, and Jonathan Horn at the Free Press, describe what happened.
It’s almost bewildering, and painful, for me to watch some of the craziness going on in Britain right no. Police officers arresting people for tweets. Grandmothers sent to prison for defending their country. A government packing the House of Lords with handpicked supporters. A church that seems in the final stages of disintegration. A prime minister whose answer to dissent and opposition is canceling elections. It’s a classic case of “gradually, then suddenly.” Lou Aguilar at The American Spectator discusses the fall of Britain – and the warning for America.
We’ve visited Oxford during most of our trips to England. We rake the tube to Paddington Station and then a train to Oxford. The trip takes about an hour. We’d visit various colleges, the Sheldonian, Blackwell’s Bookstore, the covered market, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Bodleian Library. It’s an easy day trip from London.
Christ College (which, if you’ve seen the Harry Potter movies, includes the dining hall) faces a meadow. It’s almost a shock to see a large tract of undeveloped land right by the bustle of traffic and tour groups. It’s quiet, peaceful, and rather beautiful.
What I didn’t know until I read The Bovadium Fragments by J.R.R. Tolkien, was that for more than two decades, Oxford authorities almost ran a road through the middle of it.
When I was writing my historical novel Brookhaven, I initially relied upon two main sources – the records of births and deaths in the old family Bible, and the charts and genealogical lines in the Family Search web site.
My ancestors in Mississippi served as the approximate inspiration for the McClure family in the novel. I borrowed many of the first names outright from the family Bible. I borrowed one name wholesale, to remind me of what I almost missed.
The Bible records mentioned the death of a Jarvis Seale in 1862. It didn’t mention birth, marriage, or anything else about the man. Some research in Family Search told me who he was – the husband of a great-great aunt. He was the only in-law included in the Bible records. The Family Search information only had the relationship reference and date of death. I still didn’t know what my great-grandfather had included him when others had been left out. Another web site, Find-A-Grave, showed his monument stone in a small-town cemetery in north Texas, which really made no sense.
It begins with a funeral. DCI Evan Warlow of the Wales Police is attending the funeral of his ex-wife, Denise, who’d died from complications of alcoholism. His two sons are there, one traveling all the way from Australia. The relationships are uneasy; much of the family had been splintered because of the divorce and Denise’s drinking problem. Then Warlow’s phone buzzes.
A six-year-old boy has vanished from his family’s home. His mother and sister had been distracted with a fire at an adjoining property. The fire was extinguished, but the boy was gone. It isn’t just that there are few clues; absolutely no clues can be found anywhere. The fire department determines that the fire had been deliberately set. It appears it was staged to facilitate a kidnapping.
Rhys Dylan
Gravely Concerned is the fifth in the DCI Evan Warlow series by Welsh writer Rhys Dylan. The story is compacted into less than 24 hours, and it’s told to show how Warlow and his team move from zero clues and motive to ultimate resolution.
Dylan has published 19 novels in the DCI Evan Warlow series, of which Suffer the Dead is the fourth. A native Welshman educated in London, Dylan wrote numerous books for children and adults under various pen names across several genres. He began writing the DCI Warlow series in 2021. He lives in Wales.
Dylan fills Gravely Concerned with tension, relieved by the police team’s camaraderie and the humor it engenders. He also allows the reader to know some of what’s happened, which cleverly both relives and adds to the tension. This is a story of every parent’s nightmare, told well and expertly.
