Provision

After 1 Samuel 21:1-22:5 

It is aid the Lord provides,

but what of the times

when there is no bread

but the holy bread, set

aside solely for the Lord?

Hunger gnaws, provision

is needed, but to take

the holy bread, meant

only for the Lord?

The priest was willing;

he offered the bread

and was accepted,

the gift set aside

solely for the Lord, 

now provision

from the Lord.

 

Photograph by Kate Remmer via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Rainbows Keep Showing Up – Katie Andraski at Katie’s Ground.

 

“The Sky-Lark,” poem by Felicia Hemans – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

The Need to Knead – Ryan Tinetti at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Ministry Doesn’t Have to be a Spectacle – Josh Oh at Sola Network.

 

Seeing Goodness More Clearly – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review talks with Shemaiah Gonzalez.

"On Frost and Eliot" by William Pritchard

William Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. His teaching has focused on 20^th century poetry and fiction, but’s also taught on Shakespeare and major English writers from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. 

 

His books include Updike: America’s Man of Letters, English Papers: A Teaching Life, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. He writes reviews for such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Times Literary Supplement, and is both an advisory editor and essayist for the Hudson Review. 

Pritchard is, in short, a literary critic. And he’s collected his reviews, articles and essays on the two most influential poets of the 20^th century under the title of On Frost and Eliot. 

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Dream Song – poem by George MacDonald at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“October,” poem by Robert Frost – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Birthplace,” poem by Robert Frost – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

"A Slowly Dying Cause" by Elizabeth George

It helped to have heard Elizabeth George speak in early October at the St. Louis County Library. She was doing a promotional tour for her new novel, and among many other things, she noted that Inspector Thomas Lynley would show up late in the story. 

And Inspector Lynley does indeed show up rather late for story billed as “A Lynley Novel.” A Slowly Dying Cause, the twenty-first in the Inspector Lynley series, doesn’t even mention him until about page 120, and he and his detective sergeant, Barbara Havers, don’t really start assuming a significant role until about the middle of the book.  

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

Poets and Poems: Patricia Clark and “Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars”

Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars: Poems, a collection by Patricia Clark published in 2020, seems at first glance to be about nature. It includes poems about river birches, birds like hawks and mallards, gardens, moths, bees, spiders, the orca whale, and more. Even the poems not directly about nature touch upon the subject or theme in some way. 

And yet, as you read and speak some of the poems aloud, you at first sense and then see that these are not nature poems. They may use nature as a subject, they may display nature in all its wonder and diversity, but they are definitely not nature poems. Nature may be the frame or the stage, but Clark is writing about life.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Raven – poem by Edgar Alllan Poe at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Requiem – poem by David Whyte.

 

A Conversation with Jared Cater, Part 2 – Sunil Iyengar at New Verse Review.

 

Autumn Damask – poem by Sandra Marchetti at Every Day Poems.

 

“Low Barometer,” poem by Robert Bridges – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Killing Stones” by Ann Cleeves

Jimmy Perez is back, at least in a co-starring role. 

A few years have passed since Perez left the Shetland Islands. We thought that might have been the end of the beloved series by British author Ann Cleeves. But no, he’s returned to the printed page, this time in his new home, the Orkney Islands. (For geographical information, the Shetlands (main city: Lerwick) are northeast of Scotland; the Orkneys (main city: Kirkwall) are more north. (Personal promotion: part of my novel Dancing Prince is set on the fictional island of Broughby in the Orkneys.)

 

Perez, his pregnant wife Willow Reeves, and their young son are living in the Orkneys. The marriage is a bit complicated, in that Willow is technically Perez’s boss; she supervises all police detectives in the islands, although Perze is assigned to a specific police unit with its own boss.

 

Archie Stout, a farmer on the Orkney island of Westray, is found murdered near a gold course. An  odd murder weapon has been used – one of two ancient stones from the Westray history museum, and the other stone is missing. Perez is initially assigned to investigate, but Stout is his closest friend and a friend since childhood. That relationship puts Perez too close to maintain professional objectivity, and Willow steps in, with Perez doing supporting work back in Kirkwall.  

Ann Cleeves

At first it seems that Stout had no enemies, but as Willow on her end and Perez on his soon come to learn, few things were what they seemed. It’s almost as if it would be easier to investigate who didn’t have a motive.

 

The Killing Stones is the new Jimmy Perez novel, and it has all the characteristics of the original Shetland series (minus some of the familiar supporting characters). That includes tight writing, a mystery that seems almost unsolvable, several suspects with motives, a few surprises and twists along the way, and a fast-paced and nail-biting climax. It might not have as much of Perez as the Shetland novels do, but Cleeves is still telling a great story.

 

Cleeves has published eight mysteries in the Jimmy Perez / Shetland series, including Raven Black (2008), Red Bones (2009), White Nights (2010), Blue Lightning (2011), Dead Water (2014), Thin Air (2015), Cold Earth (2017), and Wild Fire (2019). She’s also published 11 mystery novels in the Vera Stanhope series (also a television series), six Inspector Stephen Ramsay mysteries, and several other works and short stories. The Jimmy Perez novels are the basis for the BBC television series “Shetland.” Cleeves lives in northeastern England. 

 

Related:

 Missing in the Snow by Ann Cleeves. 

The Long Call by Ann Cleeves.

The Woman on the Island by Ann Cleeves. 

My review of Wild Fire by Ann Cleeves.

My review of Cold Earth by Ann Cleeves.

 My review of Red Bones by Ann Cleeves.

 My review of Raven Black by Ann Cleeves.

 My review of White Nights by Ann Cleeves.

 My review of Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves. 

 My review of Dead Water by Ann Cleeves.

 My review of Thin Air by Ann Cleeves.

My review of The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Is Harper Lee Rolling in Her Grave? – Kat Rosenfeld at The Free Press.

 

The Doomed Romances of Noir – Vincent Zandri at Crime Reads.

 

The Post-Literate Republic – Adam Smith at The Ford Leadership Forum.

 

At the Archbishops’ Palace in Charing – Spitalfields Life.

 

London Rebuilt 1897 – 1927. A Snapshot of an Ever Changing City – A London Inheritance.

A wife's dilemma

After 1 Samuel 18:20-19:24 

What happens when 

a wife is forced to choose

between a father and

a husband? How is the wife’s 

heart torn apart, knowing 

she must betray a father 

to protect a husband? 

This woman, forced

to choose, doesn’t

hesitate. She makes

her choice: protect

her husband. Perhaps

she knows her father’s

darkness, her husband’s

light. Perhaps she heard

the voice of God, guiding

her to protect and not

to abet murder. She pays

the price every choice

demands.

 

Photograph by Letizia Bordoni via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

More than a Welcome: Why Calling Your Church to Worship Really Matters – Barnabas Piper at Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

 

This is Not a Soapbox – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

 

St. Ciaran’s Fox – poem by Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street. 

Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 25, 2025

It was a mystery. A New Orleans couple discovered an 1,800-yearold Roman tombstone in their backyard. No, it wasn’t evidence that the Roman Empire had spread farther westward than previously known. The explanation turned out to be not unexpected. And the tombstone eventually found its way to where it belonged. 

The worldwide Anglican Church has been moving in this direction for some time, but the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury brought the fracture. The new archbishop will not be installed until March, but the appointment itself was sufficient. The Anglican churches of Asia, Africa, South America, and even some in North America have “declared a reset of the Anglican Communion,” and the Anglican Church in England is not invited (presumably along with the Anglican churches in Canada and Australia and the Episcopal Church in the United States). 

 

Robert Frost kept a small one in his pocket. Gerard Manly Hopkins toted one as well. I’m not in their league, but I carry one with me almost everywhere I go. “It” is the notebook, and T.M. Moore at Front Porch Republic extols its virtues. 

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

William Billings: Patriot, composer, leather-tanner – David Stowe at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Cornwallis Yields: The Yorktown Surrender – Jason Clark at This is the Day.

 

An Englishman’s Journal of the Revolutionary War: The Journals of Nicholas Cresswell 1774-1777 – Kenneth Bancroft at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Arthur Lee’s Warning – Bob Ruppert at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

In January 1776, Virginia’s Port City of Norfolk Was Set Ablaze, Galvanizing the Revolution. But Who Really Lit the Match? – Andrew Lawler at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Book Review: War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution – Eric Sterner at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

British Stuff

 

Can London never change? – Samuel Weiss at The Critic Magazine.

 

Israel

 

A Time to Say Thank You – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

Life and Culture

 

Heather Cox Richardson’s Revisionist History – Blake Dodge and Katherine Dee at The Free Press.

 

Possibilities – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

The Dawn of the Postliterate Society – James Marriott at The Free Press.

 

Education in a Different Story – Nina Tarpley at Front Porch Republic.

 

Faith

 

How to Stay Human: C.S. Lewis on the Doctrine of Man – Louis Markos at Desiring God.

 

What Do Miniature Codices Tell Us About Early Christianity? #2 – Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder.

 

The Plight of the Christian Scholar – John Ahern at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Big Lessons from Small Things – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Poetry

 

Sonnet 14: “If thou dost love me, let it be for nought” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

My little Poem: howl – Megan Willome as inspired by Vachel Lindsay.

 

Art, Life, and the Sonnet – Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at New Verse Review.

 

“High Barbary,” poem by J. Howard Stables – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

On Being Haunted by Milton’s Paradise Lost – Matthew Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“The Death of Autumn,” poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Ruminant – poem by Megan Willome.

 

Aodhán King – Time – Lauren Daigle

 Painting: A Breton Infants School, watercolor over pencil on paper (1882), by Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer (1824-1909). 

Spirit departs

After 1 Samuel 18:12-18 

What happens when

the spirit, the anointing

departs? The knowledge

of abandonment, 

the vacuum of absence,

the pain is loss all aching

to be filled, and filled

it is, with its opposite,

a curse, an evil spirit

taking control, control

of the heart. The jealousy

grows, the fear escalates,

anything becomes

acceptable to control

the fear, to tame what

is now seen as the enemy.

The spirit of light departs;

the spirit of darkness has

arrived.

 

Photograph by Nsey Benajah via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“The Withered Leaf,” poem by William Lisle Bowles – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Many Things Keep Happening – Spencer Klavan at The New Jerusalem.

 

Stone and Flesh – poem by Alex Kneen at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“Through Every Age, Eternal God,” hymn by Isaac Watts – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Clouds – poem by Seth Lewis.

Poets and Poems: Paul Willis and "Orvieto"

Travel writer Rick Steves says Orvieto in central Italy is precisely what an Italian hill town should be. Poet Paul Willis agrees.  

A walled medieval city. A funicular that transports you from the train station to the old town. Churches. Monuments. Museums. Wine tours. Stone archways bridging across streets. Views of the plains  And only 90 minutes from Rome by train. 

 

Willis visited Orvieto, and he’s composed a chapbook of 26 poems about the city, where “the cobblestone alleys / barely keep the walls apart.” 

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Autumn Song,” poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Two Great Lights – poem by Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.

 

We Can Remember – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

“The Island,” poem by A.A. Milne – Poems Ancient and Modern.

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” by Wendell Berry

Andy Catlett, whom we first met as a boy in an earlier novel by Wendell Berry, is now an old man. As old men are wont to do, he’s looking backward – at his life, his parents’ lives, and even earlier. And what he sees, far more clearly than he would have seen in his youth, is what shaped four generations of Catletts, including himself and his own children. 

It is a story, a story that happened to his grandfather, Marce Catlett, a story that happened in less than 24 hours but lasted more than a century. And it shows every sign of continuing to last. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Irish Tigers from Louisiana (and why they fought for the South in the Civil War) – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era. 

 

Life of the Mind & Heart at Hillsdale College – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty. 

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

 

It’s a wonderful issue.

 

Related:

 

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and "Points in the Network"

I love reading big poetry epics and sagas. My idea of a fun time might be reading Beowulf in the J.R.R. Tolkien or Seamus Heaney translations, or even the translation I read in my college textbook, the Norton Anthology of English Literature. (I still have it, more than 50 years later.) Then there’s reading and rereading the stories told in verse form by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

Epics and sagas are feasts, but a diet exclusively composed of feasts would quickly become boring and meaningless, losing and sense of “special-ness.” The vast majority of what we consume is everyday meals; the vast majority of the poetry I read is what I would call the poetry of the everyday. And few posts excel at the poetry of the everyday like Gabrielle Myers. Consider her new collection, Points in the Network.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Truth Eludes Even Old Men – Tara Isabella Burton at The Free Press on Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

 

Poetry Club Date: True North – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Down by the Salley Gardens,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

A Conversation with Jared Carter, Part 1 – Sunil Iyengar at New Verse Review.

 

Taxonomy of Churning – poem by Erin Murphy at Every Day Poems.

“Bones at the Manor House” by Emma Jameson

Dr. Benjamin Bones, assigned at the beginning of World War II to be the resident physician for the village of Birdswing in Cornwall and nearby environs, finds himself in a second murder investigation. The first (Bones in the Blackout) was been that of his wife on the evening they first arrived in the village. This time, he’s called to examine a body at Belsham Manor, which looks like suicide. Or, as Dr. Bones soon realizes, a murder designed by the manor’s servants to look like suicide.  

Lady Juliet, who lives in Birdswing in her own manor with her mother, has discovered she’s attracted to the doctor and had assisted him in helping solve the first murder. She has her own problems, however, having been deserted by a worthless cad of a husband who married her for her money and then promptly disappeared. Everyone gets surprised, however, when the husband unexpectedly shows up, and Lady Juliet learns she must continue the pretense of a happy marriage for wartime security purposes.

 

Emma Jameson

The murder victim has had a reputation of being something of a ladies’ man, except no one knows in this case if the lady in question is a servant or the lady of the manor. The local air raid warden is doubling as a police detective (there’s a manpower shortage, after all) and is ready to arrest the man’s wife, who aids in the investigation by confessing. Dr. Bones is convinced the confession is designed to protect her own family. 

 

Bones at the Manor House is the second of four Dr. Benjamin Bones mysteries by British mystery author Emma Jameson, who’s also written the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mystery series (all set in London and have something to do with the word “blue”). This second novel in the series is fast-paced and highly readable, with something of a “locked room” air about it, but I found credulity stretched a bit when the scientific Dr. Bones seems to rather eagerly join into a séance and using a Ouija Board.

 

But the story is fun and officially a “cozy” read, with virtually no violence (other than the finding of the dead man). But a fan of the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mysteries, I’m looking forward to the next two in the Dr. Bones series.

 

Related:

Ice Blue by Emma Jameson.

 

Blue Murder by Emma Jameson.

 

Something Blue by Emma Jameson.

 

Black & Blue by Emma Jameson.

 

Blue Blooded by Emma Jameson.

 

Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson.

 

Untrue Blue by Emma Jameson. 

 

London Blue by Emma Jameson.

 

Bones in the Blackout by Emma Jameson.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Mr. Twiddle goes west – Jeffrey Streeter at English Republic of Letters.

 

Brits have not lost their appetite for freedom – Emma Schubart at The Critic Magazine.

A king's jealousy

After 1 Samuel 18:8-16 

To hear a warrior praised

for his success, his deeds,

greater than the king’s

success and deeds, and

suddenly the music and

songs of celebration

fall away, leaving silence,

a dread silence, in the ears

of the king. The silence

of pride and jealousy provides

the opening for a spirit,

evil and malicious, to enter

a king’s heart. He bides

his time; he doesn’t strike

yet. He waits until he hears

the warrior play the lyre,

and without warning 

the king hurls a spear.

He misses, twice, but

he still bides his time.

 

Photograph by Peter Forster via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

What is “Shalom” According to Scripture? – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Snowbird: Between places – Mel Livatino at Front Porch Republic.

 

The Fruit of the Spirit: Self Control – Robb Brunansky at The Cripplegate.