One thing email and texting has done is almost eliminate the old-fashioned letter. And letters were the stuff of biographers and historians. Example: we know a lot about poets like T.S. Eliot because of the letters he wrote. Another example: Robert Frost. Ben Myers, writing for Portico, looks at Frost’s letters and asks,“Did Robert Frost Despair for His Soul?”
In 1825, a hero of the America Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, retuned to America for a visit. He survived the French Revolution, which didn’t treat aristocrats kindly, because the American Revolution and the role he played made him a national hero in France as well. Fifty years later, he came back, and the return was a triumph.
I read a considerable amount of poetry. I read all kinds of poetry – ancient, modern, Romantic, Victoriam, contemporary, poetry in translation, Japanese haiku. I’ve read The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and Green Knight, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s sonnets. I can invariably find something to like, in whole or in part, of virtually everything I read.
It’s a famous poem, author unknown. It’s called the national poem of France. It’s the story of Charlemagne’s nephew who falls in battle against the invading Saracens at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778. It’s a story of courage, betrayal, and ultimate victory. For centuries, it’s inspired playwrights, writers, poets (contemporary poet Mark Jarman wrote a poem about it), novels, stories, and even a rock song and a video game.
Detective Cameron Ballack is not only back; he’s on a roll. Two mysteries so far this year!
The wheelchair-bound detective is the creation of writer Luke Davis. He’s works with the Greater St. Louis Special Investigative Division. The unit functions as a special task force focused on murder and occasionally general mayhem.
In The Burning Glow, published in June, he helped track down a car bomber. In his recent adventure, An Academy of Murder, Ballack finds himself on farm more familiar ground. A janitor has been found dead at King’s Prep, a private Christian school. It almost looks like suicide, but the forensic investigation shows it was murder.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
He was born Paul Anschell in 1920, an only child. His life was framed by the place where he grew up and the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century that destroyed his family and everything that was familiar. Yet he survived. Under the name of Paul Celan, he continued continuing to write the poetry he began in his teens, poetry full of the images of life and death.
It’s an engaging, enthralling biography. Arno brings to life a man haunted by tragedy, horrendous events, and loss, and she shows how he folded it all into his poetry.
