Mary Ann B. Miller

Lent Always Takes Us

Arts & Literature

“In this series, Craig illuminates our most profound feelings of fear of abandonment at the hour of our death: ‘there was nowhere else to turn. / There never had been.’ Even God cannot take our physical death from us. We are like the apostles after Jesus's death, who ‘had to face the truth, who they were / without Him.’ In Ignatian fashion, Craig the Apostle appears to accept his death: ‘If He wants me to die, I'll die.’ Yet he does not take eternal life for granted, ‘He's always come, though today might be different,’ while Craig the Poet reminds us, ‘We sing because something in us won't give up.’ We will not be paralyzed by fear of death.”

Reaching Forever

Arts & Literature

“Even while writing within the tradition of the twentieth-century's Christ-haunted literature of the southern United States, Philip C. Kolin gives us poems that help us hear ‘God's voices’ in the twenty-first century. Flannery O'Connor's readers needed to be reminded that even escaped convicts could be instruments of grace. Our Age needs to be reminded that priests can be as well. Benedictine ‘monks are God's bakers of grace’ delivering loaves of bread to ‘halfway/houses, shelters, nursing homes, jails.’ Fr. Derivaux ministered to the imprisoned in Parchman Penitentiary, who wear ‘striped habits / to sigh the name of Jesus.’ A retired pastor from New Orleans' Church of the Holy Spirit ‘looks the way/I think God would want to look’ during the funeral of a friend. Yet Kolin is not sentimental in the least in his apocalyptic hopefulness. This volume is peppered like ‘dark-roux gumbo’ with wolves, scarecrows, serpent tattoos, black boys in the Ohio River, making us even more in awe of Kolin's faith that we could Reach, in the sense of ‘arrive at,’ Forever. Reading these poems is a spiritual experience. Their intonations resonate long after putting the book down.”

Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo

Arts & Literature

“In Rocking Like It's All Intermezzo, Maryanne Hannan invites us to find the cosmic irony in understanding human life as merely a brief solo interlude during which we wait for the climax in the whole grand story of God's creation of the world and its end, when each of our lives is already ultimately eternal and communal because ‘divinity itself we bear,’ and God's presence is palpable in the here and now as well.”