Poets and Poems: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and "The Unfolding"

In August of 2021, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer was in Georgia with her husband, daughter, and son, helping her parents move into a retirement home. Two nights later, her 19-year-old son committed suicide. Later that year, her father died of kidney failure. Two close family deaths, close together. One inexplicable. One understandable, but still a loss. 

Trommer’s The Unfolding isn’t about the stages of grief. I don’t think that kind of loss can have stages, which imply gradually getting over it, coming to terms, and acceptance. Suicide doesn’t work like that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Belonging to the Garden – Matt Miller at Front Porch Republic.

 

At St Botolph Without Aldgate – A London Inheritance via Spitalfields Life.

 

Little Christmas Carol – James Witmer at Story Warren.

 

A Single Word – Laura Lynn Brown at Every Day Poems.

 

Hybrid Publishing is a Viable Option – Vin Zandri at The New Daily Journal.

"The Grey Wolf" by Louise Penny

It starts as a series of seemingly unrelated events. Two unrelated people are killed, hundreds of kilometers apart, in the exact same execution style. An elderly visitor leaves a bottle of terrible-tasting liqueur at the bistro in Three Pines. An old coat belonging to Armand Gamache, head of Homicide for Quebec’s Surete, is stolen from his Montreal apartment, and then returned. In a pocket is a list of spices, and a single word – water. Then a young man, an activist for an environmental group, meets with Gamache – and run over in a car inches away from Gamache himself. The driver is later founded murdered. 

Gamache and his team, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste, will soon learn that they are dealing with a planned terrorist act, designed to destabilize the government, institute a dictatorship, and involving officials at almost the very top of Canada’s political leadership. They will travel to remote monasteries, the Vatican, Washington, D.C., and a remote fishing village in Labrador, desperately trying to determine what’s planned and when.

 

Louise Penny

The Grey Wolf is the 19^th novel in the Armand Gamache series by Canadian author Louise Penny. It’s a gripping, creative fast-paced story, with an ending that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat to the very end. And while it does its predecessor novels proud, very little of the story involves Gamache’s home village of Three Pines and its collection of unusual residents. On the plus side, it avoids the trap its predecessor novel, A World of Curiosities, fell into, when we were given a bit too much of the author’s personal politics.

 

What it does have, however, is the promise of the next installment in the series. Because with a grey wolf, there is a black wolf.

 

Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novels have been bestsellers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. She’s received numerous awards, including a Crime Writers Association Dagger Award and the Agatha Award, and she’s been a finalist for the Edgar Award. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. She lives near Montreal. 

 

Related:

 

My review of Kingdom of the Blind.

 

My review of Glass Houses.

 

My review of A Great Reckoning.

 

My review of The Long Way Home.

 

My review of How the Light Gets In.

 

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

 

My review of The Hangman.

 

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.

 

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

 

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

 

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

 

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

 

My review of The Brutal Telling.

 

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

 

My review of A Better Man.

 

My review of All the Devils Are Here.

 

My review of The Madness of Crowds.

 

My review of A World of Curiosities.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Patron Subjects: Who were the Wertheimers, the family that sat for a dozen of John Singer Sargent’s paintings? – Jean Strouse at The American Scholar.

 

Fading Light – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

Monumental painting in SLAM’s collection only known survivor of its kind – St. Louis Art Museum. 

 

Bah Humbug: The Crime of Loneliness in Holiday Stories – Lindy Ryan at CrimeReads.

 

The Outsized Impact of George Cukor’s “Gaslight” – Bonnie Kistler at CrimeReads.

Poets and Poems: Catherine Abbey Hodges and “Empty Me Full”

From the first poem in Empty Me Full, I had the distinct impression I had entered of series of successive dreams. I was about 10 poems in when I realized what it was – Catherine Abbey Hodges powerfully uses images to pull the reader to ask fundamental questions. Or is it questioning the fundamentals? 

A few images from the first poem of her new collections: a rising river, a time lapse of the night sky, the torso of heaven, mice nesting in a piano, the arch of a dying oak, a worm in the oak dreaming as it chews. The images come so fast that you’re moving through a metaphorical mist, knowing all the time you’re nearing something important.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Two people – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Red Chair – poem by Maurice Manning at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Daily, Under My Breath – poem by Katherine Whitcomb at Every Day Poems.

 

“The moon looked into my window,” poem by e.e. cummings – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Ekphrastic Poem Prompt: In the Lost House – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Remembrance Day Parade in Gettysburg – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

When Fiction Seems to Predict Fact

The Dancing Priest novels seem to be back in the fiction-becomes-fact business. 

Last week, after saying he would not resign, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby did, in fact, resign. This followed the release of the Makin Report, which documented the failings of the Church of England (COE) in a cover-up of an abuse scandal. The scandal went back to the 1980s when a barrister named John Smyth abused young teens at COE church camps, slipped out of England when it appeared the law was onto him, and went on to victimize more boys in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

 

Welby’s sin: he learned about the abuse in 2013 but failed to report it to authorities. Smyth could have been brought to justice at that time; he died in 2018.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Ruth Gledhill via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Ed Tech Revolution Has Failed – Jared Cooney Horvath at After Babel.

 

The Books You Come Back To – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

The Last Words of Alexei Navalny – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” short story by Ambrose Bierce – The Imaginative Conservative.

Why covet?

After Exodus 20:17 and Philippians 4:10-13 

Why covet anything

not yours? Why covet

what you don’t have?

Do you believe that

having what you don’t

will solve your problems,

promote your reputation,

make you happy, make

you fulfilled? Here’s

the secret: even getting

what you don’t have 

or want doesn’t work,

because it’s never

enough.

 

Secret, Part 2: In lack

and plenty, abundance

and need, be content,

because you can do

all things in hm who

strengthens you.

In all things,

be content.

 

“Coveting, at its heart, is character assassination of God.” – Clay Smith, sermon March 17, 2024.

 

Photograph by Fikry Anshor via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

A small change to help the Word really do its work – Stephen Kneale at Building Jerusalem.

 

Ten Correctable Mistakes We Make When Preaching and Teaching – Steve Burchett at Christian Communicators Worldwide.

 

Good Night, My Son: A Father’s Tribute Through Tragic Loss – Conrad Mbewe at Desiring God.

 

Saturday Good Reads - Nov. 16, 2024

In September, British author and journalist Douglas Murray spoke at The New Criterion’s sixth annual Circle Lecture. His subject was the phrase “banality of evil,” first used by political scientist and historian Hannah Arendt. Murray, who is known for saying exactly what he’s thinking and saying it with razor-sharp clarity, said the phrase has a problem: it is both a piece of lazy thinking and “built on a foundation that is fundamentally rotten.” It’s not the banality of evil we should consider, he says, but its profundity. 

At Front Porch Republic, Jesse Russell reviews James Matthew Wilson’s new poetry collection, St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds. He has high praise indeed, saying Wilson “crafts a moving vision of everyday life in twenty-first century America.” 

It turns out that the most accurate political poll was the Real Clear Politics National Average, which was not a poll but an aggregator of polls. It's consistently done better than any individual poll, and it was trending toward the Republicans the week before the election. The New York Times had a Halloween surprise, attacking the poll aggregator as biased because it didn't "weight" the results. Wikipedia followed suit and actually removed the aggregator's listing. And guess what turned out to be the most accurate of the polls and aggregators? Yep, Real Clear Politics. Since the election, Wikipedia, that bastion of freedom of information, has quietly restored the deleted site. The Free Press has the story.

 

As long as I’ve been attending church, I’ve heard a lot about spiritual gifts – how to discern them, how to know which kind of gift you have, which ones applied in early church times and which ones still apply today. Tim Challies has an entirely different take on the subject, and describes the spiritual gift inventory he believes in.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Empty Words: Against Artificial Language – Matthew Miller at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Israel

 

Contextualized and Decontextualized: Israel’s Fight for Truth – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

Faith

 

Christ versus Christianity: A Paradox There from the Beginning – Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem.

 

The Harvest is Plentiful, and the Workers Won’ Stay – A Life Overseas.

 

British Stuff

 

The Church of England has to rebuild trust – Marcus Walker at The Critic Magazine.

 

Crowland Abbey – Annie Whitehead at Casting Light upon the Shadow.

 

Poetry

 

A Review of O in the Air: Poems by Maryann Corbett – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review.

 

Have you forgotten yet? – poem by Siegfried Sassoon at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Poetry,” poem by Marianne Moore – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

American Stuff

 

Tales from the road: A visit to boyhood home of KIA soldier – John Banks at Civil War Blog.

 

How Helene Gave Way to ‘Hurricane Snafu’ in the Carolinas – James Varney, Real Clear Investigations.

 

News Media

 

How Podcasts Swayed the 2024 Election – Aiden McLaughlin at The Spectator.

 

History

 

Joan of Arc’s Grief – David Bannon at Front Porch Republic.

 

Scarlet Thread – Keith and Kristyn Getty and Zach Williams

Painting: Twilight: Interior (Reading by Lamplight), oil on canvas (1909) by George Clausen.

The false witness

After Exodus 20:16 

The false witness,

the liar, wreaks

reverberating havoc.

It does not matter

if the false witness

is on the campaign trail,

or the courtroom,

in the police report,

in the academic paper,

in the classroom,

in the marketplace, 

in the Ph.D. thesis,

in the pulpit or pew,

in the scientific study,

in the home.

False witness is

the acid eating

the bonds of love,

the bonds of community,

the bonds of trust.

It is the wind and water

eroding the foundation

of life, of our life.

Whether by omission

or commission, false

witness destroys until

itself is undone.

 

Photograph by Taras Chernus via Unsplash. Used by permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

The Leak – poem by Seth Lewis.

 

When the Blind See and the Seeing are Blind – Mitch Chase at Biblical Theology.

 

What is the Unpardonable Sin? (Matthew 12) – Dan Doriani at Crossway.

 

Great Gamble: The Failed Launch of Moby Dick – Jason Clark at This is the Day.

 

“Timor Mortis Conturbat Me,” poem by Anonymous – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.