Spiritual Sunday My mother lost her favorite cousin on Friday, a woman who somehow managed to remain upbeat for years despite a brain tumor. I’ve been reading Music of the Sky: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry and found five short poems, all of them heartrendingly beautiful short poems, that I hope will bring comfort to […]
Friday Mary Oliver, who died yesterday, may have been America’s favorite poet. I taught her Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive for over 20 years in a nature-focused Introduction to Literature class and so have seen up close her impact on readers. When death has entered my own life, I have often turned to Oliver’s poetry. For […]
How do we process the deaths caused by California’s Camp Fire? Dylan Thomas’s scandalously title “Refusal to Mourn” offers a way.
Friday Yesterday Julia and I buried the ashes of writer Rachel Kranz, a dear friend who died a year ago. Her remains were divided between three who were close to her, and I chose to bury those allotted to me on the shore of Lake Eva, which sits on the edge of a bluff in […]
Longfellow turned to the story of Absolom to console a friend who had lost a son. “Chamber over the Gate” captures the grief in a supportive way.
Wordsworth has written some of the world’s great poems for coping with aging.
Poetry cannot bring back a son one has lost but it can capture his beauty, as this Jeanne Vote lyric does.
In a memorial service for my friend Rachel Kranz, I will talk about what her novels reveal about her.
A Romanian man, presumed dead and unable to convince the authorities otherwise, recalls Doc Daneeka in “Catch 22.”
