"Out Walking" by John Leax

 

I’ve read Nightwatch, the young adult novel by John Leax (1943-2924), and I’ve read his collection of short essays on writing, Grace is Where I Live and Remembering Jesus: Sonnets and Songs, one of his poetry collections. And now I’ve figuratively walked with him through the woods and fields, called Remnant Acres, near where he lived in upstate New York.

Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World is a collection of essays first published as columns in the Wellsville (NY) Daily Reporter. It is also a collection of poems on the same natural theme, because Leax found that nature spoke of God and faith and sometimes that discovery could only be expressed in poetry.

The subjects of each essay and poem are simple – a dead squirrel, a heron, stones, salamanders, the kitchen garden (and protecting it against the birds and critters), fishing, watching the moon, and more. Yet in simplicity one often finds clarity and truth, and Leax finds it in abundance. What he finds moves him to praise and prayer.

A prayer for order

Father of all creatures,

whose dwelling extends beyond this world,

let no one trivialize your being.

Let your order prevail.

Let your intentions come to be

for creation and for yourself.

Give us, each day, no more than we need,

and forgive us when we take for ourselves

the well being of others,

as we forgive others who seek to take ours.

Lead us away from our dreams of power

that we might be whole,

satisfied in you.

John Leax

It’s not my imagination that in this poem I find echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament.

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

Out Walking is a quiet, thoughtful, faithful work, a guide to what the natural order can and should mean. It may be a slim volume (140 pages), but it is packed with insight and truth.

Related:

Grace Is Where I Live by John Leax.

Nightwatch by John Leax.

Some Monday Readings

Darker – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Bone Into Stone: On translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis – Jhumpa Lahiri at The Dial.

Not So Close: Two different looks at Henry David Thoreau – Ashley Barnes at Commonweal.

The Importance of Walking a Battlefield – Doug Crenshaw at Emerging Civil War.

The Inflection Point – Michael Oren at Clarity.

Religion and Poetry Do Mix – and Mix Well

A statistic that even people familiar with the Bible find rather startling is that more than half of the Old Testament is poetry. The Psalms are the most obvious, but large parts of the major prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and his Lamentations, and Ezekiel are written in poetic form as well. Even the New Testament has poetic sections, including the Sermon on the Mount of the Gospel of Matthew.

But it’s been my own experience – mostly in Protestant denominations but with a not-insignificant overlay of Catholicism – that poetry is rarely if ever mentioned within the church context. My own eyes were opened only a decade ago, when I took a weekend seminar with poet Scott Cairns at a writing retreat. That seminar not only introduced me to Cairns’ poetry but to that of Luci Shaw, Mark Jarman, Dana Gioia, and several others. A door in my mind was suddenly flung open.

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

Some Tuesday Readings 

Exile’s Journey – Jeffrey Bilbro at Current Magazine on writing and publishing amateur poetry.

“On My First Son,” poem by Ben Jonson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Passage at Nineteen – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

"Grace Is Where I Live" by John Leax

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books. 

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

Some Monday Readings

New ones – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Labour’s war on the countryside: Farmers are being driven off the land – James Rebanks at UnHerd.

Restoring American Culture – Roger Kimball at Imprimis / Hillsdale College.

King Osiwu and a Touch of Murder – Annie Whitehead at Casting Light Upon the Shadow.

“Nightwatch” by John Leax

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel. He writes in his Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation that for years he had wanted to be a novelist, not a poet, but it took him a long time to learn (from writers like Flannery O’Connor, who said it directly) that fiction wasn’t about writing about ideas but about people and story. 

Leax’s one novel was written for young adults. Nightwatch (1989) is the story of Mark Baker, a boy growing up in a small town. It’s told in disconnected segments – Mark as a young boy, at age 11 or 12, and as a teen. His parents are both people of faith, but Mark is wayward, falling in with friends who tend to lead him further away. But all of Mark’s experiences across the years are leading him directly (and sometimes indirectly) into the arms of God. And he fights it the entire time, until he can no longer fight.

 

John Leax

It may sound like a familiar story, but Nightwatch isn’t that at all. It contains an edge, a jaggedness that you wouldn’t expect in a young adult novel or a Christian young adult novel. But Leax had taken O’Connor’s advice to heart, and he told a story about people as opposed to ideas. And he let his characters, and especially the character of Mark, to go where they might go.

 

Leax’s poetry collections include Reaching into Silence, The Task of Adam, Sonnets and Songs, and Country Labors. His non-fiction writing and essay collections include Grace Is Where I Live, In Season and Out, Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism, 120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About, and Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World. 

 

In some ways, Nightwatch is difficult to read (thus my comment about jaggedness). But it reads like a real story about a real boy, a boy capable of stupidity and hurting others, a boy who’s running as fast as he can away from God but (very) slowly comes to realize he’s not getting away. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Writing in the Middle of Things – Andrew Roycroft at The Sounding Board.

 

The disappeared and the damned: A reflection on Roger Scruton’s neglected “grooming gangs” novel – Henry George at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Bridges of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Shrouded Veterans: Honoring the Highest-Ranking Jewish Officer Killed in Action – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

 

Richard Weaver: The Conservatism of Piety – John East at The Imaginative Conservative.