Saturday Good Reads - April 16, 2022

It’s Easter weekend. We’ve had Holy or Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and tomorrow is Easter Sunday. In between is the overlooked day – what some refer to as “Holy Saturday.”  

John Robert Lee has a poem, “Gethsemani,” about Holy Thursday at Kingdom Poets. 

 

Malcolm Guite has a series of 12 sonnets about the 12 Stations of the Cross for Good Friday. 

 

Cort Gatliff at Mere Orthodoxy talks about death and life on Holy Saturday. 

 

The Critic Magazine has a feature about looking to the lesson of the Passion as we confront radical evil in the Ukraine. 

 

And Des Smith at The Gospel Coalition asks if Easter is believable.

 

More Good Reads

 

Poetry

 

Fishing with Ted Hughes – Alex Diggins at The Critic Magazine.

 

Rendering Ruins – Leland James at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

Faith

 

Does Evangelicalism Have a History? – Michael Reeves at Crossway.

 

40 Random Pieces of Advice for the Christian Life – Tim Challies.

 

A Time of Gifts – Rod Dreher at The American Conservative.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Literary Greats of Scotland – Paige Shelton at CrimeReads.

 

A Surprisingly Therapeutic Reading of Cormac McCarthy – Zach Hollifield at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Never Trust a Publisher – The Secret Author at The Critic Magazine.

 

How Dostoevsky’s Exile in Siberia Led to Four of the Greatest Novels in Literature – Kevin Birmingham at Literary Hub.

 

Ukraine

 

Putin’s Attack on Ukraine is an Attack on Its Language – Kateryna Kalytko at Literary Hub.

 

The Sins of Russia – Vladimir Solovyov at Church Life Journal.

 

The war in Ukraine: how often must history repeat itself? – Maria Shust at The Art Newspaper.

 

Russia’s Tsushima moment: Putin’s regime is suffering from an old problem — imperial overreach – Peter Caddick-Adams at The Critic Magazine.

 

Ukrainian Seminary Professor’s Plea—Please Don’t Tire of Praying – Jamie Dean at The Gospel Coalition.

 

News Media

 

White evangelicals, again: New York Times urgently probes praise music on political right – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion.

 

Coming Home – Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Painting: Charwomen in Theater, oil on canvas (1946) by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). 

The tomb cut in stone

After Luke 23:50-56 

A new tomb, cut in stone,

previously unoccupied,

a clean and silent place,

is the site they bring

the body, taken down

and wrapped in linen

strips, to prepare 

for burial. The women

came and saw the body

taken to the tomb, so

they would know where

to come with the spices

and ointments after

the day of rest. 

They made note 

of the place, the tomb,

the place to return

for final preparation,

the final ritual of life,

the preparation for

burial and sealing

of the stone.

 

Photograph by Kiwi Thompson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins

British author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is best known for his two mystery novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White. He’s also known as a friend of Charles Dickens; the two met in 1850, and Dickens not only published several of Collins’s stories in his magazines, he also collaborated with Collins on both fiction and drama projects. 

In 1878, Collins published a strange story (which may be redundant; most of his stories were strange) entitled The Haunted Hotel: A Tale of Modern Venice. The novel is set in England, Ireland, and Italy, and it certainly has the stamp of Collins, being a mystery with supernatural or ghostly overtones.

 

An English aristocrat, Lord Montbarry, has surprised his family and friends by breaking off his engagement with a cousin, Agnes Lockwood, to marry a foreign countess. The new Lady Montbarry is completely unacceptable to the family; she and her brother, a supposed baron, seem more like goldiggers. When they learn that the lord’s wealth is all tied to entailed holdings (which means they can’t own and sell anything; the property remains with whomever holds the title), they induce the lord to take out a life insurance policy.

 

While on their extended honeymoon, the newlyweds rent a palace in Venice. The bride’s brother joins them. And it is not long before the lord succumbs to what is diagnosed as bronchitis. An investigation is launched by the insurance company, but all seems aboveboard.

 

Wilkie Collins

Except, of course, it’s not. The widow is becoming haunted by what has happened; the story beings with her consulting a renowned physician in London, trying to determine f she’s going mad. She has become convinced that the jilted fiancée, who by all accounts is a young woman of sterling reputation, will be the instrument of the widow’s own death. 

 

Collins mixes mystery and a ghost story together. He adds the deceased lord’s missing manservant, and a mysterious payment made to the manservant’s wife, swirling the plot into an even more mysterious direction. We know what likely happened – Lord Montbarry was likely murdered. But we don’t know what happened, and how the perpetrators managed to pull it off.

 

The Haunted Hotel is a classic Wilkie Collins novel, with a mix of mystery, murder, and the supernatural. Originally published in 1878, it has the charmingly formal language of the Victorian age coupled with a tale of the supernatural. The ghosts of those who die before their time don’t rest easy. 

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, a group of some 1,700 Union cavalry traveled from LaGrange Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In less than three weeks, they cut a swath through central Mississippi surprising Confederate forces, Mississippi’s governor, and a number of cities and small towns along the way. Their goal: disrupt Confederate supply lines and draw attention from General Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River right below Vicksburg. 

The cavalry, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson of Jacksonville, Illinois (and a music teacher in civilian life), were wildly successful. Grierson’s Raid, as it became known, was celebrated in the North and even grudgingly admired in the South. It had pulled off what few thought possible.

 

One might think that such an event would have been the subject of numerous books. For whatever reasons, possibly including a bias toward the eastern battle front in the Civil War, few book-length accounts are to be found. Dee Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid in 1954. It was not well received by critics, and its reputation has not improved with time. Brown often made fast and loose with his account, inventing conversations and scenes out of whole cloth. Even a non-historian like myself can read it today and see where Brown fudged, or invented, his facts.

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

As the Crow Flies: “Rainbow Crow” by Megan Willome and Hasani Browne

Some years back, my small suburb of St. Louis waged war against crows. 

Residents were required to place household trash in plastic bags at the curb. The city even furnished the black plastic bags free of charge. We’d dutifully put out the bagged trash – only to see flocks of crows gather for the attack. Some would artfully bore a hole in a bag of trash and extract whatever might be available. Other crows would bludgeon the bags with great rips and tears, distributing garbage all over the grass and street.

 

Neighbors held meetings. Advice was shared. Suggestions were made. Scarecrows were a non-starter. Spraying Lysol on the bags was only a very temporary deterrent. Running out and yelling at the birds worked as long as you physically guarded your garbage. Admitting defeat, we knew the crows had won. They don’t call a flock a murder of crows for no good reason.

 

I was reminded of our crow wars when I read Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form by Megan Willome and Hasani Browne, a beautifully illustrated book for young readers that introduces various poetic forms. And it does so with poems about crows. Remembering the scenes of my garbage strewn about my lawn, I will admit to a nostalgic feeling of wanting to strangle a crow as I read this delightful book.

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

The Poets Who Came in from the Cold

The East German secret police flourished from 1950 to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Officially the organization was known as the Ministry for State Security; in German, the shorthand was “Stasi.” It was responsible for both domestic surveillance and foreign espionage, and it was roundly hated by most of the East German people. 

It became known for kidnapping East German officials who had fled the country or defected and bringing them back for trial and execution. By the time the East German government collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed 100,000 people and routinely used another 500,000 to two million people to spy on their fellow citizens, work colleagues, friends, and family members. The Stasi maintained files on some six million East Germans, more than a third of the population. 

 

And some members of the Stasi, as journalist Philip Oltermann discovered, not only wrote poetry but participated in a poetry discussion group.

 

The Berlin chief for the British newspaper The Guardian, Olterman painstakingly put together historical records, public information, copies of poems in literary journals, our-of-print poetry collections, and interviews with Stasi members still alive. The result is The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War.

 

Philip Oltermann

It is a strange and fascinating story, part James Bond, part John le Carre, and perhaps even part Get Smart. The Stasi apparently really believed it could help shape the culture (and spy on it) by encouraging its members to write and publish poetry. And the real surprise is that quite a few of the agents were good poets.

 

And the author does a thorough and exhaustive job of tracking down these men (yes, they were entirely men) and the poetry they wrote. They were taught by an East German intellectual named Uwe Berger, who had died in 2014. Berger had published a multitude of books, many of which were admired by West German critics, and had received the German Democratic Republic’s National Prize for Literature in 1972. Interestingly enough, despite his fame and all the awards he received, Berger never joined the East German version of the communist party. But he helped to train Stasi agents as poets, agents who in turn spied on fellow writers.

 

Oltermann is the Berlin bureau chief for The Guardian. He grew up in Germany and studied English and German literature at Oxford and University College London. He’s also published How to Write (2012) and Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (2012), and he’s written for newspapers in Britain and Germany, the London Review of Books, Granta Magazine, Prospect, The Nation, and other publications. He and his family live in Berlin.

 

The Stasi Poetry Circle is a story of the Cold War, a story of a communist regime, and a story of poets / government agents who took their poetry very seriously. 

The necessary death

After Luke 23:32-49 

It had to be, this death,

mandated by heaven.

The innocent nailed

to the tree, placed

between thieves,

listens to them

mocking, gambling

for his clothes,

the elites ridiculing

him, telling him

to save himself,

the soldiers mocking,

telling him to save

himself, and the thief,

mocking, telling him

to save himself, only 

the remaining thief

understanding the death

was necessary, asking 

to be remembered.

 

The darkness comes

like a wrathful storm. 

The curtain rips, a sign

of departure, He speaks

his last, commending

himself into his father’s

hands. And it is done.

It is finished.

It is accomplished,

this necessary death.

 

Photograph by Joshua Fuller via Unsplash. Used with permission.