Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
One of the charms of Peter Reason’s “In Search of Grace” is his human honesty at the gap between the lofty ambition of pilgrimage and actual experience. At the very outset of…
It’s been a while since I have posted any Tipperary Stained Glass posts. I suppose the best explanation is that the chance hasn’t presented itself – this is very much…
It is Epiphany, or Theophany in Eastern Christendom. Water features strongly in this liturgy; it is the occasion of the Great Blessing Of The Waters. This video, seven years old,…
Auden’s “In Memory of W B Yeats” is a great tribute poem, especially the closing lines: Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice…
From The Paris Review: In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week.…
At First Known When Lost, Stephen Pentz collects some versions of fragmentary lines by the Spartan lyric poem Alcman. This fragment was used by Edgar Allan Poe for the epigraph…
From James Common’s blog, an extract from a fascinating sounding book whose themes seem to chime with my own interests. I particularly found this passage resonant: ‘Silence’ is a fascinating…
It is often argued that appreciation of nature is a phenomenon of industrial societies. The implication being that “nature” is something that intellectuals and city folk appreciate – not people…
Séamus Sweeney 