The oath

After Hebrews 6:13-20 

The promise was

accompanied by

an oath, to know

that it was true,

and real, and it

would happen.

 

The oath bridged 

the promise and

the moment, 

because we are

frail, inclined 

to impatience and

the demands 

of now.

 

The oath reminded

of what had been 

promised before

and delivered. 

The oath means

the promise will

not be forsaken. 

 

Photograph by Cytonn Photography via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Of Death and Resurrection – poem by William Strode at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

When I Don’t Love My Body – Lara D’Entremont at A Faithful Imagination. 

 

Slow Happiness – Seth Lewis.

 

Optimistic Denominationalism – Tim Challies.

 

Poems to Listen By: Buoyancies – 1: Casting Off – Laurie Klein at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness

The entire spring issue of Cultivating Oaks is devoted to the theme of grace. Published are stories by Lancia Smith, Malcolm Guite, Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Adam Nettesheim, Amy Malskeit, Steven Garber, Corey Latta, Tom Darin Liskey, Nicole Howe, Amelia Freidline, Lara D’Entremont, and several others. 

For me, reading a very familiar Bible story – the account of Joseph in the Book of Genesis – led me in an unexpected direction of grace. You can read the story, “Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness,” at Cultivating Oaks Press. 

 

Photograph by Michael Olsen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Looking Good Dead" by Stephen Puleston

Detective Inspector Ian Drake of the North Wales Police Service is back from his honeymoon in Tenerife. And his first day in the office, he gets a murder case tossed in his lap. 

A well-heeled local businesswoman is found hanged in her clothing shop, one of the many businesses she operates. She’s dressed in 1930s clothes; she and her husband were known for hosting charitable fundraisers with 1930s themes. As Drake and team soon discover, they were also known for histing “spinoff parties,” also known as mate-swapping or swinger parties. 

 

Drake discovers a long list of suspects. The husband has a motive, as does at least two now-divorced participants in the spinoff parties. And the killer seems to be relishing the attention to the case and helps it along by sending photographs of the dead woman to news media. A second murder occurs, and this time the killer takes photographs of the police at the crime scene, sending them to the personal attention of DI Drake.

 

Stephen Puleston

Looking Good Dead is the 12^th novel in the DI Ian Drake mystery series by Welsh author Stephen Puleston. It’s a well-plotted story about a police detective with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Drake has progressed since the first novel, when his OCD was threatening his marriage to a doctor (and would eventually lead to his divorce). He’s being helped greatly by the woman who’s become his new wife.

 

What I hadn’t previously noticed was that Puleston has written the Drake stories in such a way that the OCD is literally part of the narrative. Descriptions of characters are very detailed and precise, as are the descriptions of how Drake and his team travel to different locations, with precise highway designations, speeds, roadway obstacles, bridges, and tunnels. It’s as if Drake himself is overseeing the writing to make sure it meets his expectations.

 

Puleston publishes two series of Welsh police detective stories. Detective Inspector Ian Drake is with the North Wales Police Service, and Detective Inspector John Marco is with the South Wales Police Service. The author originally trained and practiced as a; solicitor/lawyer. He also attended the University of London. He lives in Wales, very close to where his fictional hero lives and works.

 

Related:

 

My review of Written in Blood.

 

My review of A Time to Kill.

 

My review of Another Good Killing.

 

My review of Brass in Pocket.

 

My review of Worse than Dead.

 

My review of Against the Tide.

 

My review of Devil’s Kitchen.

 

My review of Dead Smart.

 

My review of Speechless.

 

My review of A Cold Dark Heart.

 

My review of A Cold Dark Heart.

 

My review of Dead and Gone by Stephen Puleston.

 

My review of Time to Die by Stephen Puleston.

 

My review of Stone Cold Dead by Stephen Puleston.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Heyday of Pulp Fiction – Keith Roysdon at CrimeReads.

 

Rejected by a Robot: You Aren’t the Writer These Droids Are Looking For – David Murray at Writing Boots.

 

Tradition and the Truth That Anchors Us – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Looking Back at the End of Blue & Gray – Sean Michael Chick at Emerging Civil War.

The Things That Shape Our Writing

I read last week that Netflix has attempted to do what I thought was impossible – turn One Hundred Years of Solitude into a 16-episode television series. 

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was in college in the early 1970s. It had been translated into English and published in the U.S., and I bought the paperback edition at the LSU Union Bookstore. It might have been near exam time; I had a habit of buying riveting novels at exam time, when I should have been studying.

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

A Note to a Writer on Writing into the Dark – Harvey Stanbrough at Harvey’s (Almost) Daily Journal.

 

Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 81 Years Later – David Unsworth at Fox News.

 

Whodunnit? The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s Will – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Poets and Poems: Jen Karetnick and "Inheritance with a High Error Rate"

I’ve read several of Jen Karetnick’s poetry collections over the years, and I’ve come to expect an expert eye for image and metaphor. With five poetry collections, poems published in a host of literary journals and magazines, and several prizes for her work, you would expect her to know how to use words and language. Yet she always manages to go beyond the expected, with images that intrigue, challenge, sometimes jar the mind.

 

Her latest collection, Inheritance with a High Error Rate, does not disappoint. Whether she’s writing about a deceased brother, the symphony of a tropical storm, selling a waterfront home in Miami or 10 things you don’t know about the city, or being followed by @Death on X (formerly Twitter), she surprises and delights with how she makes sense out of marrying two very different ideas or words together.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Be Mindful – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Poetry Prompt: How Does Your Garden Grow? – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“In That Sleep of Death” by Jonathan Dunsky

I can’t make up my mind here. Is In that Sleep of Death, the latest Adam Lapid story by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky, a mystery or a literary novel? The obvious answer is that it’s some of both. 

It’s 1952. Lapid is a private investigator based in Tel Aviv. He has a painful past – a police detective in Hungary who, with his wife mother, and two daughters, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 for the crime of being Jewish. He is the family’s only survivor. 

 

For a time after the war, he hunted former Nazis in Europe, quietly and effectively exacting justice. He emigrated to Israel in time for the 1948 War of Independence, in which he was seriously wounded after a heroic action to save his unit from Egyptian gunners. Now he’s a private detective; he bears no great regard for the police, as it was the Hungarian police who herded his family into a boxcar.

 

Sometimes, after nightmares leave him unable to sleep, Lapid wanders the streets of Tel Aviv. And so one night he sees a fellow night wanderer and feels a kinship, even though the two never speak. It’s Lapid who finds the man’s body and calls it in anonymously to the police, and it’s Lapid who takes on his own investigation after the police come up short. And his investigation takes him into the stories of pre-war Jewish Poland, the Holocaust, and contemporary frauds. And it make be taking him into unexpected romance.

 

Jonathan Dunsky

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with eight published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, The Auschwitz Detective, A Death in Jerusalem, and now In That Sleep of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; the short story “The Unlucky Woman,” and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

 

In That Sleep of Death is a fine mystery, but it’s also something I hadn’t noticed before in Dunsky’s books – it’s something of a literary novel as well. It has a Kafkaesque beginning, the wandering of empty nighttime streets. It has the overall feel of a literary novel, and yet it’s clearly a detective mystery, not unlike the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Dunsky has produced a good story, an intriguing mystery, and a solid literary effort.

 

Related:

 

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Dead Sister by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Violinist by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Debt of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Deadly Act by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Death in Jerusalem by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Rise of the Cyber City – Walter Russell Mead at Tablet Magazine.

 

Post Office Tower and Tower Tavern – A London Inheritance.

 

Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners – Spitalfields Life.

 

Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’ – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on Golda Meir’s speech in 1948.

Why trust?

After Hebrews 6:13-20

 

Why trust, you ask,

why believe that

a promise made

eons ago will be

delivered? Time passes,

cries made in pain

seem met with

silence.

 

I tell you this:

the promise will come,

the promise is coming.

It was made

with an oath; 

it was made with

perfect character;

it was made with

the sacrifice

of the son. 

Photograph by Jannis Lucas via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Some Sunday Readings

 

Debunking Four Retirement Myths – Kristin Brown at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics. 

 

Poetry: The Spiritual Terrain of David Middleton – James Matthew Wilson at The Catholic World Report.

 

Rome Is Not Our Home: Live Counterculturally During Election Season – Pete Nicholas at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Saturday Good Reads - April 20, 2024

I’m sure the people at National Public Radio feel like they’ve had better weeks. After business editor Uri Berliner’s essay in The Free Press last week, NPR CEO Katherine Maher suspended him for five days without pay. Then Berliner resigned. The conservative and independent press took a look at Maher and her history on social media, including what was called her “guide to the holidays.” Stephen Miller at The Spectator asked where all of Berliner’s defenders in the news media might be, while Matt Taibbi at Racket News took both The New York Times and NPR to task for burying the story’s lede. And Jonathan Turley at The Hill asked the biggest question overall (in my humble opinion): Should NPR rely on listeners rather than taxpayers like you? 

Boeing’s woes continue, with another whistleblower testifying about safety problems with the 777 and the 787 Dreamliner (like what we usually fly when we go to London). Maureen Tkacik at The American Prospect took a look at the revised statement by the whistleblower found dead of an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound. And she describes what Boeing did to the guys who remember how to build a plane. And I keep thinking, this is Boeing!

 

Netflix has done what I thought was impossible: created a movie version of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You can watch the trailer here. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Israel

 

How Did the War Begin? With Iran’s Appeasers in Washington – Michael Oren at The Free Press.

 

Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary – Simon Lewson at The Walrus reviews Who by Fire by Matti Friedman. 

 

Passover 5784, reliving ancient history – David Horowitz at The Times of Israel.

 

Life and Culture

 

Inside the disinformation industry – Freddie Sayers at UnHerd.

 

Poetry

 

James Matthew Wilson on Bookmaking – Let Go the Goat. 

 

Wobbly, I am – John Kerrigan at London Review of Books on The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid.

 

“Break, Break, Break,” poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Anthony Horowitz on Giving Himself a Role in His Latest Mystery – John Valeri at Crime Reads.

 

Think AI Is Bad for Authors? The Worst is Yet to Come – Mike Trigg at Writer’s Digest. 

 

Faith and Russian Literature – Gary Saul Morson at First Things Magazine.

 

Eugene Vodolazkin on the Puppeteering of History – Joshua Hren at Church Life Journal.

 

Faith

 

It’s Okay to Be a Two-Talent Christian – Tim Challies.

 

Your Faith is Secondhand – T.M. Suffield at Nuakh.

 

American Stuff

 

Taps: How a Medal of Honor Recipient Gave America Its Most Famous Military Bugle Call Ever – Stephen Ruiz at Military.com. 

 

British Stuff

 

In the Roof of St. Paul’s – Spitalfields Life. 

 

Sancte Michael – Gregorian Chant by Gloriae Dei Cantores

 Painting: Reading the Standard, oil on canvas by Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958).

An oath, a promise

After Hebrews 6:13-20 

He swears an oath,

he makes a promise,

an oath, a promise

given in his name,

because no one is

greater. The man

receives the oath,

the promise, and he

waits, patiently,

because he knows

they are good,

they will be made

good. The promise 

would be realized;

the promise would be

obtained.

 

Photograph by Marcus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Anne Askew – featured poet at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

You Know the Way – Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.

 

To Welcome a Stain – Seth Lewis.

 

Vespers – Anna Friedrich at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Fides, Spes,” poem by Willa Cather – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Letter from the Dead" by Jack Gatland

It starts at a funeral. Detective Inspector Declan Walsh watches as the coffin of his father, retired Chief Superintendent Patrick Walsh, is lowered into the ground. The man died in what was determined to be a roadway accident; Declan suspects it was murder.  

Declan’s own police career is problematic at best. He’s been suspended, ostensibly for punching a priest involved in a dognapping scheme. He knows, as does everyone on the force, that it was Declan’s uncovering a number of corrupt police officers. His choices look limited indeed, until his father’s former DCI, Alexander Monroe, offers an opportunity – joining what is a cold case squad based in the Temple area of central London. It’s a squad of police misfits, including Monroe himself, people chucked away from the primary police force for reasons of embarrassment, politics, or career missteps. They call themselves the “Last Chance Saloon.”

 

The first case Declan works on is a murder from 20 years previously. A wealthy woman was pushed to her death from the roof of the family estate. Her husband was convicted and sent to prison. The death happened during a fundraiser for the Labour Party, and three then-rising political stars were possibly involved as well. One is now homeless and living on the streets of London. One became a YouTube religious personality. And the third may become Britain’s next prime minister.

 

Jack Gatland

What reopens the case is a letter – a letter from the dead woman written shortly before her murder. The letter was found in old police files. And no one can explain why it was never investigated. It suggests that the killer may be someone other than her convicted husband, who died in prison from cancer. And the letter will take Declan and his team on a whirlwind of a case, with implications for the police, the people originally involved, and the British government.

 

Letter from the Dead is the first of the currently 18 DI Declan Walsh mysteries by British writer Jack Gatland. Gatland is the pen name for bestselling writer Tony Lee, who’s written comics, graphic novels, audio drama, TV and film series, the BBC and ITV, and a host of publishers. In addition to the Declan Walsh series, he’s also published four novels in the Ellie Reckless series, six in the Tom Marlowe series, and several others. The 19^th Declan Walsh novel is to be published in June 2024.

 

I’m always looking for a new mystery series, and Letter from the Dead suggests I’ve found a real gem. 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Bloody-Minded Business: Julian Symons Evolution as a Crime Fiction Critic – Curtis Evans at CrimeReads.

 

The Microcosm of London – Spitalfields Life.

Some Wednesday Readings

Science and Poetry: William Blake and the Doctrine of Double Truth – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern. 

The Real War in the Mideast Comes into Focus – Matti Friedman at The Free Press.

 

The Inescapable Melancholy of Phone Boxes – Spitalfields Life.

 

The Venerable Bede – England’s First Great Historian – Dana Huntley at British Heritage.

 

An Oration on the Scholar’s Mission – Orestes Brownson at The Imaginative Conservative (speech first given in 1843 at Dartmouth College. 

 

Can the “Everyone is a Spy” Bill be Stopped? – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

Among the missing, among the dead: Black poetry in America – William Logan at New Criterion.

 

Illustration: Orestes Brownson (1803-1872).

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and "Dear Dante"

If I were asked to name the greatest poets in human history, I would likely name five: Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton. There they are: a Greek, a Roman, a Florentine, and two Englishmen. Yes, the list reflects my Eurocentric perspective, but there it is. 

Dante (1265-1321) serves as a pivot point between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the more recognizable modern world of Milton. Chaucer (ca. 1340s-1400) is chronologically close to Dante and is believed to have memorized at least parts of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by heart. While many of the people mentioned in The Divine Comedy are not well known today outside their own historical era, that doesn’t detract from the greatness of the poetical work.

 

In the summer of 2021, to mark the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s death, poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell decided to reread The Divine Comedy by one canto a day (100 cantos, she wrote, and about 100 days of summer, seemed an almost perfect match).

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The calm after the storm,” poem by Giacomo Leopardi – Beverley Bie Brahic at The New Criterion.

 

Pax – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

A Conversation with Maurice Manning – Ben Palpant at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

No wait – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

"I Cheerfully Refuse" by Leif Enger

It is sometime in the future, but perhaps not the distant future. Rainey, a bear of man in his 30s, lives with Lark, the woman he adores, in a small town on the Lake Superior coastline. Rainey plays guitar with a local group, while Lark runs a bookstore. They have, if not a comfortable life, a life they enjoy living together. Some people don’t enjoy life at all and have taken something called Willow, billed as a doorway into another life but sounding more like a suicide pill.  

Lark makes an occasional trip to nearby places like Duluth whenever she hears of an estate sale or other availability of books. It’s only used books that are now sold; no one’s publishing new ones. Electricity functions off and on. People try to muddle through as best they can; Willow is becoming a more attractive option. Manufacturing, like for security systems and pharmaceuticals, happens on big ships docked in lakes, rivers, and the ocean. People with no other way to make a living can become indentured servants or volunteer to be test subjects.

 

The coasts, and everything within them, are owned by 16 families, while the interior regions function as best they can. There seems to be some kind of theocracy in the South; parts of the Upper Midwest seems to function under some kind of general, if fraying, agreement. The U.S. dollar still functions; there just doesn’t seem to be much of it around, creating a thriving barter system. To the north, Canada has been affected, too, but seems somewhat better off.

 

Something has happened to the world in I Cheerfully Refuse, the new novel by Leif Enger, but what that something is isn’t exactly defined. Climate change, perhaps. Societal breakdown, for sure. Rainey and Lark don’t hoard, except for coffee beans. Replacing a mechanical part is often a major exercise in search and bartering.

 

Leif Enger

A young man named Kellan stumbles into the life of Rainey and Lark. They suspect he’s a squelette, the term for indentured servants who’ve run away. But he offers Lark an old, advanced reading copy of I Cheerfully Refuse, a book by Mollie Thorn, who lived in the middle of the 20^th century. For Lark, it’s a treasure, personally more meaningful than any other book. On a sailing trip, years before, Lark and Rainey met Mollie Thorn, or perhaps her ghost, in the Slate Islands off the coast of Canada. 

 

Kellan suddenly disappears, but they don’t think much of it. Rainey is playing a gig in the local pub when he sees officers come inside, and they’re looking for him. He rushes out the back door, arriving home to find his house torn apart, And worse. He flees to the only refuge he knows – their sailboat Flower and the safety of the lake. Trying to understand what happened, he sets sail for the Slates, hoping to find Lark there, much like they found Millie Thorn.

 

It's an extraordinary story, simultaneously fictional and dystopian yet so close to contemporary reality that it’s eerie. And perhaps a bit frightening,

 

Enger is the author the three previous novels, including the widely acclaimed Peace Like a River; So Young, Brave and Handsome; and Virgil Wander. A native of Minnesota, all three of his novels have received awards and national recognitions. He lives with his family in Duluth. 

 

I Cheerfully Refuse is a novel about books and the love for them, about the things that bind us together and tear us apart, about the choices we make, and about the love we share and should always cherish. And it’s the story of a man who will brave adversity and danger and still hold on to love.  

 

Related:

 

Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. 

 

Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young and Handsome. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

“Spring and All,” poem by William Carlos Williams – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

W.S. Gilbert – Alexander Larman at The Critic Magazine. 

 

The Prophets: Eric Hoffer – Rob Henderson at The Free Press.

 

Why Does Being Left-Wing Make You Unhappy? – Ian Leslie at The Ruffian. 

 

What options does Israel have? – Douglas Murray at The Spectator.

 

On to maturity

After Hebrews 5:11-6:12 

Unplug your ears,

open your eyes,

unchain your hearts.

Don’t cling to milk,

the food of newborns,

but leave the food

to newborns.

On to maturity:

now is the time

for solid food.

Now is the time

for solid growth.

Now is the time

to sow, to reap,

to produce a crop

that sustains,

to produce a crop 

that nourishes, 

to produce a crop

useful for those

for whom it’s grown,

for whom the seed’s

been given.

 

Photograph by Hui Sang via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Same Person in Every Room – Seth Lewis.

 

Encounters with the Counter-Cultural Power of Silence – Thomas Hibbs & Mollie Moore at Church Life Journal.

 

The Fear is Where You Begin – poem by Andy Patton at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

The Christian Response to Cultural Catastrophe – Casey McCall at Remembrance of Former Days.

 

Dark Enchantment – N.S. Lyons at First Things Magazine reviews Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come by John Daniel Davidson.