Saturday Good Reads: “11 September 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge”

When I was in elementary school, I spent a considerable amount of time at the local public library. It was located about two miles from our home in a rather nondescript building along a busy highway near the New Orleans airport, and it says something about the times that I was allowed to bike there by myself when I was seven and eight years old.

Some of my favorite books were part of a series called “We Were There,” like “We Were There at the Boston Tea Party” and “We Were There at the Battle of Gettysburg.” The books were children’s fiction (marked with the “Y” of the Dewey Decimal System), and followed a standard format – the story a boy and a girl caught up in momentous historical events. They were designed to get children interested in history, and the strategy surely worked with me. I still remember reading the one about the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese at the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II.

I was reminded of the “We Were There” books when I read the ebook 11 September 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge, William Wallace’s Greatest Victory over the English. That’s a long title for a succinct book that can be read in less than an hour. It’s not a book designed for children, however, but for adults. And it’s part of a project by Decisive Days, which is publishing accounts of important days or events in history. The first book in the program is one on the Battle of Agincourt; the next will be on Waterloo.

Stirling Bridge isn’t the romanticized version of the William Wallace story created for the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart; instead, it is a factual (and gripping) narrative of how outnumbered Scot forces defeated the English army. And they won by being smart and picking the battleground.  The story is written almost like a factual eyewitness account, but with the needed context to explain why the English were there in the first place, what was happening with the Scot nobility, and how this no-account named William Wallace achieved a significant victory that changed the course of British history and is still remembered today (and celebrated, in Scotland if not England).

I enjoyed this so much that I went to Amazon downloaded the Decisive Days volume on Agincourt. (“We few, we happy few,” as Shakespeare tells it in Henry V).

If you enjoy history, British history, or military history, or think you should but haven’t read any in a long time, try Stirling Bridge. I suspect you will get hooked. I am.

Illustration: The Battle of Stirling Bridge (reconstructed from accounts)

Laura Boggess on “Poetry at Work”

Laura Boggess at The Wellspring has some kind words to say about my book, Poetry at Work. And she was reading it, and a book of poems by May Oliver, while she was in the hospital. (Hospitals contain their own particular kind of poetry.)

Laura and her husband live in West Virginia, is the mother of two boys (teenagers – we all understand). She’s a writer, a preacher, and a regular walker, bringing her camera along whenever she’s walking (and jogging).

See what she has to say about Poetry at Work.

Chris Yokel’s “A Year in Weetamoo Woods”

Some 40 miles west of St. Louis is one of my favorite places – Shaw Nature Reserve, which all of us residents call by the name it was originally called – “The Arboretum.” It’s more than 2,400 acres of woods and trails, with some managed gardens but mostly woods. A favorite walk is the river trail, out and down to the Meramec River, one of the reserve’s boundaries.

When you’re mostly a dweller of city and suburb, woods become an escape and respite, but also a point of reference. They are a place to go to clarify and consider, a point of reference and a means of reflection. Thoreau did it at Walden, and Wendell Berry has done it in Kentucky, but you don’t have to be famous to seek out the calm and silence of nature.

Teacher, songwriter and poet Chris Yokel has done it, too, at a nature preserve in Rhode Island called Weetamoo Woods. From the fall of 2011 through the summer of 2012, Yokel traveled from his home in Massachusetts to find reflection, and he collected it as A Year in Weetamoo Woods: Poems.

The poems are divided by the four seasons. The woods change, of course, from the dying of fall and white of winter to the spring (when “bursting buds / betray the signs of / the gardener”) and on to the hot richness of summer. Here is “Fallen Ones,” from the winter section but offering a glimpse of the spring, and life, to come.

Stark against the sun

they silhouette the hill—

broken trees

like shafts of shivered spears,

a memorial to the

Battle of the Four Winds

whose rage twisted ancient ones

from earth.

I feel its gale-borne arrows

pierce my heart with memory,

Yet here amid the blasted trunks,

the supple birch springs up

both strong and straight.

The poems from the Weetamoo Woods become poems about life, birth, regeneration, beauty, art, imagination, and faith. They are about the woods, yes, and about the life of the poet in the woods. But in a very quiet way, the poems become our lives, too, our experiences, our reflections.

A Year in Weetamoo Woods does something else, too. It serves as a reminder that we all need time for thoughtful consideration of our lives, and there’s no better place to do that than the woods.

It’s time for me to make another visit to my own woods. And I’ll bring these poems with me.

(By the way, Chris is going to be leading a workshop for students on J.R.R. Tolkien at Tweetspeak Poetry, covering The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and Tolkien Life. You can find the details at Tweetspeak.)

Photograph of Weetmoo Woods: Eventful

David Hilliam’s “Crown, Orb & Sceptre”

Charles I, the Stuart king of England executed by the Parliamentary forces in 1649, was 4 feet seven inches tall. (You’d never know it by looking at all those paintings of him.) His coronation was filled with mishaps, perhaps omens of what was to come. His wife, Maria Henrietta, refused to participate; she was a devout Catholic and wanted no part of a Protestant ceremony. No red or purple velvet could be found for the king’s robes, so he was dressed all in white. Charles slipped and almost fell as he entered Westminster Abbey. A jewel fell out of the coronation ring. And just as the coronation service was coming to an end, an earthquake shook London.

Thus author David Hilliam tells the story of Charles, and all the other kings and queens of England, in Crown, Orb & Sceptre: The True Story of English Coronations. It’s a popular history, meticulously researched, written in a highly readable and engaging style, and instantly appealing to certain American tourists who happen to be browsing the books at the Tower of London gift shop (who had also written two novels that included certain scenes related to the British monarchy; see book links at right).

An author can’t write a history of English coronations with including some history of the kings and queens themselves, and so the book includes a fair amount of general information for context. And interesting facts.

A small monastery had been built in Saxon times in the area west of the city of London, and it eventually destroyed by Danish invaders. Still, the area was known was the “Western Monastery,” or “Minister of the West,” or “Westminster.” It became the site (rather swampy, and something of an island of the Thames) for Westminster Abbey. The abbey was consecrated the year its builder, King Edward (the Confessor), died – in 1066. A few other things happened that year as well, but every monarch after Edward was crowned there. Today, Westminster is the location of the church, the state (represented by Parliament), and the monarch (Buckingham Palace.

Isabella, the wife of King John (he of Magna Charta fame), was 13 or 14 when she was crowned queen in 1200.

Henry V’s wife Catherine of Valois was crowned queen in 1421; the menu at the coronation banquet included roast porpoise and fried minnows – no meat could be served because the coronation occurred during Lent.

Most of the original crown jewels were destroyed (or melted down) by Oliver Cromwell.

For centuries, the coronation included a procession from the Tower of London to the Abbey, although a few times it had to be rather curtailed because of bubonic plague afflicting the city. The procession was eventually discontinued.

George I (crowned in 1714) couldn’t speak a lick of English.

Only two kings were never crowned – the boy king likely murdered with his brother in the Tower of London by his uncle, Richard III, and Edward VIII, who gave up the throne rather than give up twice-divorced America Wallis Simpson in 1936.

Elizabeth II listened patiently to all the advice of her advisors, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and overruled them, insisting her coronation would be broadcast on television.

Crown, Orb & Sceptre succinctly summarizes each coronation, covering more than a thousand years of English history. It’s full of facts and stories, well known and not, of this institution of the British monarchy that continues to fascinate us today.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Is Our Heart Bigger Than Just for Ourselves?

I’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers by Bob Sorge, as part of an online discussion group. It’s not a difficult book to read, but it can be a difficult book to digest. As in, is the purpose of affliction to make us grow spiritually? Does God allow (or bring) affliction to make us grow? If you look at the comments on these posts here and the blogs of others ion the discussion group, you’ll find a wide array of responses, including some people who’ve been offended.

I don’t have a good answer to those questions. If I give an emphatic “Yes!” it sounds like an almost mechanical existence we lead. If I give an emphatic “No way!” then I’m going to have to accept the fact that a lot of things simply don’t have explanations. Bad stuff happens.

Sorge uses the example of Hezekiah, one of the good kings of the southern kingdom of Judah. With the Assyrians besieging Jerusalem, Hezekiah begs for, and is granted, God’s mercy. When God tells him later that his sons would be taken away and made eunuchs by the king of Babylon, Hezekiah’s response is the equivalent of “I’m good with that. At least I’ll have peace in my last days.”

Apres moi, le deluge. Indeed.

This isn’t a question or issue confined to a Biblical text of 2,500 years ago. What’s been on my mind lately is my grandchildren, and their children, and how we are borrowing money to spend today that they will have to pay back long after we’re gone.

There’s something wrong about this. Profoundly wrong.

Congress is preparing to approve a trillion-dollar spending bill. The mind boggles. One trillion dollars. We don’t have one trillion dollars waiting to be spent. We have some fraction of that. We will have to borrow a large part of that trillion dollars.

It doesn’t really matter what it’s being spent on. Our great-grandchildren won’t care whether it was fighter jets or food stamps. All they and their parents will know is that we impoverished them, that we recklessly spent far beyond our means, and we didn’t care.

No matter how noble the cause, the ends don’t justify the means. They never have. But we act worse than drunken sailors because drunken sailors, at least, will eventually sober up.

Apres moi, le deluge.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. We’re finishing up chapter 9, “Desperate Dependence & Heart Enlargement.” To see more posts, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by James Hawkins via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

It’s Poetry at Work Day!

I wrote the book Poetry at Work because I unexpectedly discovered that the workplace, and the work that happens there, is shot through with poetry.

This didn’t happen early in my career; in fact, it was some three to four years ago, during a particularly bad point in my work. I was sitting in one of those regular weekly meetings, hearing many of the same things you hear repeatedly at regular weekly meetings, and trying not to yawn my boredom. And suddenly I heard poetry like one hears as unexpected byt welcome, and familiar, piece of music.

To continue reading, and to learn all the details about Poetry at Work Day, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by x posid via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pinocchio in Nineveh

This post first appeared at The Master’s Artist.

How much does culture – American culture – influence Christianity as practiced in the United States? It’s a fair question, and the answer is likely “a lot more than we realize.” The idea is that Christianity is supposed be salt and light in the culture, but we know from the New Testament and from the history of the church that it too often works the other way.

Benjamin Myers is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. His first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, was published in 2010, and received the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. His poems have been published in such journals as The Chiron Review and Christianity and Literature, and included in several anthologies.

Elegy for Trains is a fine collection, with poems ranging thematically from Shakespeare to seasons, from the writing process to Psalms and Revelations. But Myers also considers this “faith and culture question, and he does so in an interesting poem entitled “Jonah and Pinocchio:”

It was the two whales,

swimming each an inch

below the surface of my eight-year-old

mind that confused me,

left me standing before the Sunday School class

mute in my corduroy pants,

hair as stiff and slicked as the oil-spill

collected in the rushes along the beach,

trying to remember

what God sent a marionette

to Nineveh and whether the message

was “repent” or “always tell the truth.”

I wasn’t here that often,

and they were waiting

for me to retell the story of the prophet,

but I kept adding donkey ears,

a growing nose,

a blue fairy where there ought to be a storm.

Then the little room itself

rolled around me

like a stomach. The window

on the far wall became a blowhole

through which I was given a vision:

trees in an upward avalanche of green,

each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight

after the long skin and bones of winter.

And who’s to say I wasn’t right,

that the point of the story might not be

that after this life’s long childhood of wood,

I could awake some clear, cold morning

where the waves wash over the sand

to find I have become a real boy.

Pinocchio – the story of the puppet boy who, through a series of adventures and misadventures, eventually becomes a real boy, first appeared in story form in 1883. But it was Walt Disney who transformed the story into an American cultural icon, with the famous admonition to always tell the truth or your nose will grow.

There is a whale in the story – Monstro, who devours Pinocchio’s father Geppetto. The whale plays a critical role in the climax of the story, when Pinocchio becomes a real boy.

Benjamin Myers rather playfully takes one whale story – Monstro in Pinocchio – and confuses it as a child would confuse it. Asked to tell the story of Jonah and the whale, the child in Myers’ poem conflates the whale of Jonah with the whale of Pinocchio. God sends a marionette to Nineveh, with a message to repent or to tell the truth; the child isn’t sure.

But he plunges onward, “…adding donkey ears/ a growing nose / a blue fairy.” The room becomes the interior of the whale (Pinocchio’s whale), and the child has a vision of “trees in an upward avalanche of green, / each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight / after the long skin and bones of winter.”

He digs his hole deeper and deeper (you can almost feel the child squirming). And then, right at the end, he realizes that, if they’re not the same story, they actually may have the same outcome. The child speaker of the poem realizes that, like Pinocchio, he may one day become a real boy.

One way to consider the poem, and the boy’s dilemma, is to see his required recitation in the context of both whales – both stories – competing for the telling. He means to tell the faith story, the Jonah story, but it’s the cultural story, the Pinocchio story, that (mostly) comes out. And yet nothing is actually lost, because in this long childhood of wood, the real boy may well emerge.

Culture can be used redemptively, too.

Illustration by Enrico Mazzanti, the first illustrator of Le avventure  di Pinocchio (1883).