As I listened

After Nehemiah 8:1-18

As I listened to the words

read by the priest

I could see the wall

rebuilt around us

the wall we had

rebuilt around us

The priest read the words

to rebuild our hearts

rebuild my heart

like the wall around us

We are together again

our hearts are together again

we rebuild

we restore

we are restored.

Photograph by Rajesh Misra via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“The Seven Secrets” by William Le Queux

William Le Queux (1864-1927) was an extremely prolific writer whose career stretched from the Victorian Era to the Roaring 20s. He published some 170 fictional works of mystery, espionage, and thrillers; 20 works of non-fiction; and 21 collections of short stories. One of best known (and best-selling) works during his lifetime was The Invasion of Britain, a fictional account of a German invasion published in 1910.

Le Queux churned out four or five novels a year. One that is fairly typical of his mystery stories is The Seven Secrets, first published in 1903 (one of five works he published that year – the man was a veritable Niagara Falls of words and stories).

The Seven Secrets provides a glimpse into the kind of popular writing readers enjoyed at the turn of the 20^th century. It also reflects the enduring influence of Sherlock Holmes.

Ralph Boyd is a doctor who works as a kind of junior partner to a well-known society doctor on Harley street in London. He is engaged to Ethelwynn Mivart, who lives with her sister Mary and Mary’s much-older husband, Henry Courtenay. In his chief’s absence, Boyd is called to the Courtenay house in Richmond near Kew Gardens. Mr. Courtenay is dead, stabbed in his bed.

Everything about the death is mysterious. His young wife was not at home, staying with friends in London. The house was seemingly locked up tight – Mr. Courtenay had been fearful of burglars. Neither Ethelwynn nor any of the servants saw or heard anything. The police investigate, but find nothing.

Boyd calls in a friend, Ambler Jevons, a man who is a partner in a tea business but who is known to Scotland Yard and police all over Britain as one of the smartest amateur detectives ever (here’s the Sherlock Holmes influence). Jevons undertakes an investigation, but it is prolonged, complex, and largely hidden from the reader’s view.

We learn what is happening from Boyd, who’s not a bad amateur detective himself. The story is filled with disguises, secret meetings, overheard conversations, dastardly plots, surprise developments, secret informers – all the elements of what we would call high melodrama.

For all that or perhaps because of all that, The Seven Secrets is a highly entertaining story, full of action and suspense. It’s also a window on popular taste of more than a century ago.

Painting: Waterloo Bridge, London, 1903, oil on canvas by Claude Monet.

“The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 2005-2016”

“We are made for poems,” writes professor, writer, poet, and historian Mark S. Burrows. “As children, we come to them naturally, delighting in how words play on our tongues, whether in nursery rhymes and lullabies or the songs we make up in the delicious hours of daydreaming.”

But something happens, and we think we need to outgrow those rhymes and lullabies and the poetry that made our childhood hearts sing.

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 2005-2016: New and Selected Poems, edited by Burrows, seeks to restore that loss. It assembles works from the poets published by Paraclete Press over the past decade, and serves as post a signpost of what has been and an indication of what is to come.

The 131 poems from 13 poets are what can be called spiritual poems – poems about faith and its lack, poems about Scripture, poems about faith places, poems about day-to-day life and the meaning of life, poems about the cosmos and our place in it. The range across the spiritual landscape, probing, exploring, defining, wondering, remembering, and understanding.

The poets included in the anthology are Scott Cairns, Phyllis Tickle, Paul Mariani, Anna Kamienska, Father John-Julian, SAID, Bonnie Thurston, Greg Miller, William Woolfitt, Rami Shapiro, Thomas Lynch, Paul Quenon, and Rainer Maria Rilke (editor Burrows has translated poems by SAID and Rilke from the German for publication by Paraclete). The poets represent various faith traditions but there seems a kind of oneness here, as if these different traditions have the same object in view.

Phyllis Tickle (1935-2015) was the founding religion editor at Publishers Weekly, the author of more than 40 books, and for years a member of the Paraclete Press editorial board, where she championed the publishing of poetry. This is one of her poems included in the anthology:

Old Man River by Phyllis Tickle

My father called it

His boyhood’s fiercest teacher.

And child-wise, I knew

He’d once used its even fury

As a mark to sound his own.

My mother turned form us

When he made river talk.

For her, its waters ran

With married tears.

And long before I’d aged enough

To want or rear a man,

She’d willed on me

The anger of her years.

There’s a bridge above it now—

Tightly built—

No different from the land—

But it can no more bear my sons

Across his hunger

Then it can lift my breath

Above her fears.

Mark S. Burrows

Burrows is well-equipped and experienced to serve as the anthology editor. He  has translated Prayers of a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and 99 Psalms by Said. He’s also co-authored several books on Christian faith, theology, and spirituality, including Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality; Faith Can Give Us Wings: The Art of Letting Go; Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective; and Poetic Revelations: Word Made Flesh Made Word: The Power of the Word III. He is on the faculty at the University of Applied Sciences, Bochum (Germany) and a historian of medieval Christianity. His collection of poetry The Chance of Home is scheduled to be published this year. Burrows is also a senior editor Paraclete Press.

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology is filled with beautiful poetry and, collectively, a sense of the wonder of the world and how we pilgrims of faith navigate through it.

Related:

My review of Prayers of a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Mark Burrows) at Tweetspeak Poetry.

My review of 99 Psalms by Said (translated by Mark Burrows) at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.