"The Blackbird & Other Stories" by Sally Thomas

A little girl tries to lead a normal life – dance revues, school – while the shadow of her mother’s illness seems everywhere. If she focuses on dancing “The Blackbird,” she’ll be fine. 

A couple try to make sense of their grown son’s suicide, even if you can never really make sense of that kind of tragedy. Or you’re traveling with your grandparents, trying to escape, or deal with, a family breakup. Or a spouse dies, that “little cough” having turned into something fatal. Or your youngest child is born with a skin condition that essentially makes him allergic to sunlight, and you have to re-orient everything you know and do. Or you take refuge from your spouse’s beach house, the one in your family for three generations, the one containing memories of every childhood vacation. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Go On, Try It; The Semicolon Isn’t as Scary as You Think – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Writing without a platform – Brad East.

 

The kindest of ghosts: A new history of childhood reading is a treasure – Simon Evans at The Critic Magazine. 

 

Things Worth Remembering: Nothing is Lost Forever – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on playwright Tom Stoppard. 

 

A preview of the New World War I Memorial in DC – and why it will hit you hard – John Domen at WTOP.

"Works of Mercy" and Poet Robert Southwell

On Monday, I posted a short review of the novel Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog. It is a fine novel, a little slow moving at the beginning but richly rewarding if you stick with it. I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. 

The main character, an aging housekeeper named Kirsty Sain, works for the priest in a small-town Catholic parish in North Carolina. She lives a somewhat isolated life, until circumstances force a change. But what threads through the change is the poetry of Robert Southwell (1561-1595). 

Southwell, who would become a Catholic saint, was one of the Catholic martyrs in the religious wars in England in the 16^th century. Yes, but was the age of Shakespeare, but it was also the age of religious war. Henry VIII began the English Reformation; his son and heir carried it onward for the few years he was king. Catholic Mary Tudor represented the reaction, and she was no slouch when it came to martyring Protestants. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

One Simple Question, Revisited – Andrew Pessin at Clarity with Micheal Oren.

 

Narratives of Russian history – Gary Saul Morson at The New Criterion.

 

Israel says more than a third of Gaza hostages are dead – The Jerusalem Post.

 

"Works of Mercy" by Sally Thomas

Sometimes it takes tragedy, the unusual, and the suffering of others t shock us out of our own worlds. 

Kirsty Sain is the 60-something housekeeper for the parish priest in Annesdale, North Carolina. She’s originally from the Shetland Islands, and how she ended up in Annesdale is only one of the stories being told in Works of Mercy, a novel by Sally Thomas.

 

Threading through the novel is also the story of her friendship with a local handyman who decides she needs a cat to take care of her mouse problem and finds her a blind one, her marriage, her affair with her college tutor, a church family experiencing a tragedy, and the problems of the new parish priest, who doesn’t seem to eat, preaches odd sermons, and looks like he might be on the edge of a breakdown. 

 

It’s a lot to pack in 261 pages, yet Thomas pulls it off, and she does so beautifully. The reader never loses the threads of these stories, as Thomas slowly but surely pulls them together. By the end of the novel, the stories that have fused together tells us a woman’s life rescued from self-centeredness and the cocoon she’s ben encased within. Not all of the narrative threads end happily, but that is also the point. Not all of life ends happily, and happiness is not really the point of it all. 

 

Sally Thomas

Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. She serves as the thesis advisor for the M.F. A. program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She’s published two poetry chapbooks and collection Motherland, with a second collection being published this year. Also being published in 2024 is a collection of short stories, The Blackbird and Other Stories. Thomas served as co-editor (with Micah Mattix) of the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. Her writing and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Plough Quarterly, North American Anglican, Dappled Things, First Things, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. With Joseph Bottum, Thomas is the co-editor of Poems Ancient and Modern, a poetry newsletter on Substack.

 

Works of Mercy is a simple, moving novel, inhabited by recognizable people who are so much like the people we know.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Doreen Fletcher’s Spitalfields Paintings – Spitalfields Life.

 

Anne Elliott is Twenty-Seven – B.D. McClay at The Paris Review on Jane Austen.

 

Latin – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Please remember, terrorism is evil – Marcus Walker at The Critic Magazine.

 

‘You must punish the foes within your gates’ – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on the speech by Demosthenes.

"Christian Poetry in America Since 1940"

It’s said daily more times than anyone can count: Christianity in America is in serious decline. Cited are churchgoing statistics. The rise of the so-called “nones” people professing no church allegiance. The scandals in the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, and independent megachurches. The rapid slide in membership in mainline Protestant denominations. 

Yes, there’s all of that. But there’s something else, too. Christian poetry. And if Christian poetry is any indication, Christianity in America may not be in as bad as shape as we read about in the secular and religious press.

 

To that point, professor Micah Mattix and poet Sally Thomas have joined together to select and edit Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology. Featuring 35 poets, Mattix and Thomas have managed to showcase the talent, the range, and the depth of Christian poetry in the United States. The anthology includes only those poets born after 1940, and so by definition excludes such poets as Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, and Fred Chappell.

 

Micah Mattix

The included poets represent a veritable feast of poetry: Paul Mariani, Jeanne Murray Walker, Robert Shaw, Kathleen Norris, Jay Parini, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Marly Youmans, Scott Cairns, A.M. Juster, Marjorie Maddox, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Julia Kasdorf, Christian Wiman, Tania Runyan, James Matthew Wilson, Benjamin Myers, and more. The breadth is as startling as the depth; all Christian faith traditions are represented.

 

But these poems are not what you might think of as “religious poetry.” These are poems addressing the same kinds of subjects that all poets address – the seasons, geography, relationships, crises, historical subjects like the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, brokenness, and more. The difference is the perspective and the self-understanding that these poets know they are part of a much larger story. 

 

Mattix and Thomas introduce each poet with a basic biography and summary of what they write about (an accomplishment by itself – think about writing 35 concise yet perceptive introductions and keeping them all interesting). Then they include three to five poems by each. What you get is a sharp snapshot of 35 poets with an overall composite of achievement and depth.

 

Here is an included poem by Andrew Hudgins, born in 1951.

 

Raven Days

 

These are what my father calls

our raven days. The phrase is new

to me. I’m not sure what it means.

If it means we’re hungry, it’s right.

If it means we live on carrion,

it’s right. It’s also true

that every time we raise a voice

to sing, we make a caw and screech,

a raucous keening for the dead, 

of whom we have more than our share.

But the raven’s an ambiguous bird.

He forebodes death, and yet he fed

Elijah in the wilderness

and doing so fed all of us.

He knows his way around a desert

and a corpse, and these are useful skills.

 

Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University, poetry editor of First Things Magazine, and the editor of Prufrock, a daily newsletter on books, the arts, and ideas. He previously taught at Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

 

Sally Thomas

Thomas is a poetry and fiction writer. She’s published two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water and Richeldis of Walsingham, and the poetry collection Motherland. Her novel, Works of Mercy, was published by Wiseblood Books this fall. Her poems have been published in a wide array of literary magazines and journals, and she currently serves as associate poetry editor for the New York Sun.

 

Between them, Mattix and Thomas have accomplished a great blessing for the Christian poetry community in particular and the larger poetry community in general. Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 resonates with a vibrancy that many might find surprising. The real surprise should be, why haven’t you been reading these poets all along?

 

Related – my reviews at Tweetspeak Poetry of some of the included poets’ works:

 

Marjorie Maddox Hafer Publishes 2 Poetry Collections.

 

Mark Jarman’s “Bone Fires.”

 

A.M. Juster and “Wonder & Wrath.”

 

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Love in the Time of Coronavirus.”

 

Paul Mariani and “All That Will Be Knew.”

 

Benjamin Myers and “Black Sunday.”

 

Tania Runyan and “What Will Soon Take Place.”

 

Scott Cairns and “Idiot Psalms.”

 

James Matthew Wilson and “The Strangeness of the Good.”

 

Dana Gioia’s “Pity the Beautiful: Poems.”

 

Christian Wiman and “Once in the West.”