Commentary and Review
A Poem of the New Creation
Then in the prayer of the Virgin Mary
Appeared the angel Gabriel
Descending as if from distant ages
Bearing the promise long awaited
Now at last fulfilled within her
At first glance, though the verse is not rhyming and the meter throughout this
book irregular, one wonders why this counts as poetry. It’s because poetry, even when not rhyming or clearly metrical, is at least an attempt to reflect the barely expressible through
words that are ordered and structured, this very order and structure reflecting the ordered and structured nature of the poem’s subject.
In this case, there appears to be nothing hard to understand in these few lines, but think about what Fr. Milward is saying. Read the poem backwards for a moment—fulfilled within Mary is the promise
long awaited borne by the angel Gabriel, who appeared in the prayer of the Virgin. It is Mary’s prayer that brings this about, her prayer that preceded her fiat, her yes to God. The poet is telling
us that before the offer and the acceptance, before the fulfillment of the promise that became the Incarnation, the field is prepared by prayer, by Mary’s longing for the Lord, by her talking to Him
in her heart, by her relationship with Him. What does this tell us about the importance of prayer? Does God simply work automatically without us and without our calling out
to Him, our yearning for Him, our desire to unite with Him in our deepest and most silent places?
So these few words “Then in the prayer of the Virgin Mary” imply what it just
took me a paragraph to spell out. This is part of what poetry does.
And now look at a more difficult poem, and a tremendous one. This is from “The Proclamation of the Kingdom” by Pavel Chichikov in Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of
Ignatius.
To see the ripple in Siloam’s pool,
The wheat that grows, the harvest and the yield
Is to be shown the passing of the soul:
Here we are, we die, the tomb is sealed
But as the flowered galaxies decay,
The stone of death itself is rolled away,
And as the ripples of Siloam die
Scales of blindness tumble from the eye
And as the wheat is sickled from the stalk,
The leper’s cured, the crippled beggars walk,
And as the servant stands from his sickbed,
Wine is Christ, infinity is bread.
Siloam’s pool is the pool in which Christ instructed the blind man to wash so that he would be cured. Chichikov shows us the ripples in this pool, the passing waves that pass and die away in the same
way that wheat grows and is harvested by the sickle, itself an image of death. And even the very “flowered galaxies” decay—and in these images we see the passing away of our very souls—“Here we
are, we die, the tomb is sealed”.
But “the stone of death itself is rolled away” and even in the passing of the ripples of the waters of Siloam, “scales of blindness tumble from the eye”—an image that encompasses not only all of the
miraculous cures of blindness by Jesus, but also the cure of St. Paul, at whose conversion and healing scales fell from his eyes. And even as the wheat dies (and is “sickled”, a marvelous
word), the lepers are cured and the crippled are walking. And yet we are not left with images of healing and rebirth only, for the image of the “sickled” and sacrificed wheat is
carried through to the last line, where “wine is Christ, infinity is bread.”
Notice how the poet weaves the images of death and despair into the images of life and health and resurrection—how at the end even death itself is transformed as Christ—who is infinity—becomes bread
(the Eucharist), the fruit of His death and that which sustains us.
Now in pointing out to all of you poetry-haters and anti-intellectuals the merits of these verses, I am missing much of the point. For the meaning of any good poem, the revelations that come from
meditating on any good poem, can not in all fairness be separated from the way the poem is expressed, from the words and meter. The beauty of Chichikov’s poem is not simply the beauty of
its sentiments or its philosophy. Its beauty can not be severed (or you might say “sickled”) from the words and phrases that the poet so carefully chooses, and guided by the muse, arranges. The
spirit of the poem and the stuff of a poem go together.
The same can be said for people. We are composite creatures, souls enfleshed. We are walking poems. And in learning to understand poems, we can learn to understand much more than the poems
themselves.—KEVIN O'BRIEN, Theater of the Word Incorporated
Copyright 2008, Gilbert Magazine. Used with permission. A Sudden Certainty by Dwight Longenecker, A Poem of the New Creation by Peter Milward, and Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of Ignatius by Pavel Chichikov—as well as Divining Divinity by Joseph Pearce—are published by Kaufmann Publishing, www.kaufmannpublishing.com. Kevin O’Brien is an actor and writer who performs across the country with his troupe Theater of the Word Incorporated (www.thewordinc.org) and played—of all things—The Poet in EWTN’s production of G. K. Chesterton’s play The Surprise.
From Peter Stanlis
Peter Milward's A Poem of the New Creation is like a fusion of Dante Alighier's Divine Comedy and Chesterton's Orthodoxy but with the ethical, aesthetic and intellectual paradoxes reconciled into a highly original lyrical-narrative-thematic poem that harmonizes and synthesizes the tragic nature and history of mankind, its secular "trial by existence" on Earth, with the power to be transformed through the eternal "pillar of light" in the Christian epic of salvation.
The spirit of God's love for mankind permeates the poem, with a powerful, realistic and unsentimental reverence for humanity, in all of its tribulations, and for all divinely created things.
In its lyrical intensity, its mastery of literary techniques and artistic structure, so rich in many perceptive allusions to biblical, theological, historical and literary sources,
it is indeed a "new creation:" at once traditional and original, a fresh revelation of how the dark confusions in mankind's temporal condition can be transfused though the voice of Christian grace
and prophecy from its sorrowful tragedy into the joyous comedy of redemption.—PETER J. STANLIS, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Rockford College
Further comments from an accompanying note: "delighted with the poem and glad you are publishing it... should be read by Christians of all faiths, as well as non-believers, and it would do much good in dissolving the weaknesses and moral depravities that bring such evil to contemporary society."
A Sudden Certainty
One of the surprising things about our local Chesterton society is anti-intellectualism. The members would rather sit and gripe about how awful the culture is and how great the big man Gilbert is, but God forbid we should actually read his books and discuss them! This is a tendency I have heard exhibits itself in other local societies as well. And the one thing people have the most trouble with is poetry. Even the members who will read Chesterton’s essays will flinch at reading his poems. Several months ago I reviewed for Gilbert Magazine Divining Divinity, a collection of poems by Joseph Pearce, published by Kaufmann Publishing, a small publishing house that has dedicated itself to—of all things—publishing collections of poetry! Now before you skim to another article, or go running from the room in terror, or laugh derisively at the folly of such a business model, consider these lines by Father Dwight Longenecker (from A Sudden Certainty), a student’s plea to his priest …
No, no, Father, please don’t toss the mike
like a DJ when you preach. Please don’t be cool.
Please don’t ride a Harley motorbike
when you come to school.
Don’t wear red cowboy boots for Pentecost,
and tell dumb jokes to be our pal.
Please don’t “high five”,
say, “Sweet!” “Awesome!” “You suck!” or “You’re toast!”
Don’t teach us how to jive.
Don’t sing to the latest pop band;
You don’t need to be hip and up to date,
Or come to our parties with a drink in your hand,
trying to relate.
Play it straight. Say the black and do the red.
Refrain from politics and rainbow pins.
Pray for all of us, the living and the dead,
And listen to our sins.
“Say the black and do the red” refers to the missal, which serves, you might say, as the priest’s “script” for Holy Mass. The priest is supposed to say the words printed in black ink (his lines) and perform the actions indicated in red ink (his stage directions). How much simpler life would be if priests would do simply that!
—KEVIN O'BRIEN, Theater of the Word Incorporated
Copyright 2008, Gilbert Magazine. Used with permission. A Sudden Certainty by Dwight Longenecker, A Poem of the New Creation by Peter Milward, and Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of Ignatius by Pavel Chichikov—as well as Divining Divinity by Joseph Pearce—are published by Kaufmann Publishing, www.kaufmannpublishing.com. Kevin O’Brien is an actor and writer who performs across the country with his troupe Theater of the Word Incorporated (www.thewordinc.org) and played—of all things—The Poet in EWTN’s production of G. K. Chesterton’s play The Surprise.
England in Verse
I think the almost prose-like simplicity of the poems is one of their real strengths. And of course virtually every one bespeaks a mind that is acutely aware of “the fear in a handful of dust.”
A Sudden Certainty: lovely; and we’re already hearing ol’ TSE at the edge of thet thar garden! Baptism: my word! Rain, dew, sea, tears, sweat, sap, snow, sleet, et al: splendid; it’s a good
case in point of the sacramental: the tiny thing opening out onto the Whole Show. Organ: Robert Burton would envy you! You’ve dragooned everything to your purpose. And “transposing”—lovely. Dogwood:
beautiful metaphor! Bravo! Incense: this is what poetry is about—the thurible to Pentecost to the bush to Sinai to the cloudy pillar.
I have marked and annotated all of the poems, and found myself stopping at each one. Ol' Hopkins would like your crimson and gold gashed vermillion and whirling gyres and penitential pyres!! And oh how one echoes the young priest's complaint... I never visited St. Stephens' Gloucester Road for some reason: mawkish pictures forsooth. Very touching visit, though. That brown sparrow: tears often come to my eyes as I look at the woodpecker, cardinals, and the plain modest juncos at my bird feeders just inches from my study windows. "A Student's Plea" should be shouted from the housetops at seminaries! —THOMAS HOWARD, author, scholar, retired professor of English literature, Gordon College
Animal Kingdom
New Eyes for Creation
Pavel Chichikov sees the natural through the mystical eyes of the supernatural... This is to see things as they are meant to be seen. It is to see God's presence in the weaving of a spider's web or in the flight of a bird. It is to see as Gerard Manley Hopkins saw. It is to paint inscapes. It is to see truly.—JOSEPH PEARCE, biographer, writer-in-residence and associate professor of literature, Ave Maria University
These verses do what all art should do. They wake us up. They lay a kindly hand on our arm, and say, "Look!" Poem after poem after poem regales us with—with what? Beauty, really. Splendor. Sheer astonishment at the whole pageant of Creation. The exquisite notation of color and form, shape and variety, draws us all towards adoration of the Maker, and love for these creatures themselves.—THOMAS HOWARD, writer and scholar, noted for his studies of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams
"Divining Divinity" is Divine
Joseph Pearce’s first volume of poetry, a small illustrated pocket book called Divining Divinity, published by Kaufmann Publishing, is a delicate work. And the puns are not used to evoke laughter, but to praise God in a subtle and compact way for the intricacies of His creation. The poems in this volume are not only as sensitive and fine as anything by Emily Dickenson, they also have the brilliant structure and playful wordsmanship of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with an endearing quiet sense of the sublime—and all of them offered up in a humble attitude of praise. And yet what astonishes me is not all that, but the risk Pearce took in writing and publishing these. For poems with this much wordplay, disaster is always looming.
“Coincidences are spiritual puns.”—G K Chesterton.
Imagine that you are a stand-up comedian. Your audience is spread out before you, unseen figures beyond the stage lights, obscured by smoke and darkness. You make a joke—but it’s not exactly a
joke. It’s something like this: “I just flew in from Pittsburgh and I haven’t had the flu that bad since my chimney sweep told me my flue was clogged up.” They stare at you. There is a
terrible, dreadful silence, a moment of existential angst as you face the abyss waiting for laughter that might never come.
It takes a bold man to make a pun. Or to make a play on words.
Joseph Pearce is a bold man.
But then again we knew that about him. Anyone who’s attended the last few Chesterton conferences recalls Joseph’s lectures with delight. Anyone who’s read any number of his books—biographies on the
great Catholic converts of modern English letters, including Chesterton, Belloc, and Oscar Wilde—anyone who’s read Joseph’s latest work, The Quest for Shakespeare, which proves
not only that Shakespeare was Catholic but also that Pearce is a historical and literary scholar of the first rank—anyone who knows a little bit of Joseph’s conversion story, from street thug
skinhead to devout self-taught Catholic by way of GKC and distributism—in short, anyone who’s anyone knows Joseph Pearce is a bold man.
What we did not know is that he was a poet. A poet who is not afraid of puns.
Joseph Pearce’s first volume of poetry, a small illustrated pocket book called Divining Divinity, published by Kaufmann Publishing, is a delicate work. And the puns are not used to evoke laughter, but to praise God in a subtle and compact way for the intricacies of His creation. The poems in this volume are not only as sensitive and fine as anything by Emily Dickenson, they also have the brilliant structure and playful wordsmanship of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with an endearing quiet sense of the sublime—and all of them offered up in a humble attitude of praise. And yet what astonishes me is not all that, but the risk Pearce took in writing and publishing these. For poems with this much wordplay, disaster is always looming.
For example, of a rabbit at dawn, Pearce
writes:
Distinctive
but instinctive,
and oblivious
of oblivion.
Unconscious friar
in Franciscan fraternity;
the hare’s breath
is the hair’s breadth
from here to eternity.
It takes quite a bit of skill to write verse this complex and playful without sounding vulgar and precious. For a reader could find himself averse to such a verse. And the poet could become the
bad stand-up comic, stood up by an audience who derisively arise, not in ovation, but in condemnation, expressing their exuberance for an exodus.
And yet it’s really not Joseph’s skill that’s on display here. In the poem with the verses on the hare, we observe with the poet a sunrise—and the rising sun becomes the rising Son, Who truly brings
us from hare to eternity, as the poet observes—
Corpus Christi!
Rising through the rose,
Sanguis Christi!
Skyward flows.
Heavenly Host
so new, so old,
as Holy Ghost
turns snow to gold.
Look at the compact theology and worship in this prayerful play-on-words.
The sun is recognized as a communion wafer—Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, rising through the rose-colored sky—which is to say, He rose through the rose (Christ indeed arose through the rose,
which is also a symbol of Mary). Sanguis Christi is the blood of Christ, flowing skyward as the red dawn spreads across what was recently darkness.
And what are the Body and Blood of Christ that the poet sees spreading before him at the break of day? When seen as the rising sun, they are the Host in the Heavens, indeed the Heavenly Host—so
new, so old, as Holy Ghost turns snow to gold: here the blood of Our Lord’s sacrifice warms the frozen world and becomes the gold of the Holy Spirit, an alchemy beyond our wildest dreams.
So these poems are not just technical tricks, wordplay about the playful Word of God. There is in each of these poems a deep sense of wonder and gratitude, and a solemn attitude of awe and
praise.
My own favorite is “Dante Dilettante”, a poem about British author Sigfried Sassoon and the horrific “Great War” that shaped his character.
And Siegfried freed
From Wagnerian curses
With sacred seed
Despair disperses.
“Despair disperses”—that is a wonderful line. And if, as Chesterton noted, coincidences are spiritual puns, then puns such as these point the way to the spirit coincident with
them—the great spirituality that lies behind them, and the coincidence of just the right words in just the right meter referring forward and backward to one another and to that great Wordsmith who
made us all by way of His Word.
Let me conclude by quoting entirely Joseph’ s poem “Belloc”:
Not the bombast of relativism,
The bombast of mere opinion,
Sanitized by self-righteousness;
But the bombast of absolutes,
The bombast of certitude,
Sanctified by servitude
To the righteousness beyond the self.
These poems, which, though not bombastic, are definitely bold, are themselves
Sanctified by servitude
To the righteousness beyond the self.
—KEVIN O'BRIEN, Theater of the Word Incorporated
Copyright 2008, Gilbert Magazine. Used with permission.
God
More Biblical Meditations
This book is offered as a sequel to the author’s previous
The Enclosed Garden, and as another series of Biblical
meditations, with special emphasis on the hidden core
of the Bible, the Name of God.
The author claims no special Scriptural expertise, but
he approaches the Bible as a human being, as a priest,
and as a specialist in the drama of William Shakespeare
and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Moreover, over the past fifty years he has been teaching
the Bible to Japanese students of all ages from eighteen
to eighty, and it is out of this teaching that he offers
these reflections on the inner meaning of the Bible, as
bestriding the contrast between East and West.
What can we know of God?
By the light of Reason we can only know that God is,
but we cannot know what God is.
The mere fact of God’s existence is a light to our lives,
but for the fuller manifestation of God’s essence,
His presence and His power,
we have to rely on Biblical revelation.
Nor is it enough to know the words of the Bible,
as the scribes and Pharisees knew them.
We have to pass beyond the mere words, which kill,
to the Spirit who alone gives life to the words,
as Jesus knew the Scriptures in the light of the Spirit.
It is by following this Way that we come to know God
whose name is I AM, as revealed by God to Moses,
the FATHER, as Jesus shows to his brothers and sisters,
in the Holy Spirit of LOVE
Mysteries and Stations
in the Manner of Ignatius
These Christian poems of meditation help every reader anticipate the joyful goal at the end of the journey.
The Stations of the Cross are way-points along Jesus' path of sacrifice, suffering, and death. We go with Him even to the Tomb. Afterward, there is a garden, and a gardener who is the ascending
Christ, our Lord and God.
The Mysteries of the Rosary help us to relive His life, from before its beginning in Nazareth to His destiny in the eternal Kingdom. By prayerful attentiveness we come to share more fully in the
life, works, death, and resurrection of the Son of Man. P.C.
“Good religious poetry—poetry that is truly religious and truly poetic—is a rare and precious commodity nowadays. The spirit of the age works against it. Which in itself makes the appearance of Pavel
Chichikov's Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of Ignatius a welcome event. But so, more important, does the quality of these poems. As meditations, whose manner
resembles the Ignatian technique called composition of place, they mine the Mysteries of the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross in order to bring forth a luminous iconography of redemption. A
sensibility in the tradition of Dickinson and Donne, an eye for vivid imagery, and an ear for the telling phrase meet here in verse that is as much to be prayed as read.” —RUSSELL SHAW, eminent
Catholic columnist
“Pavel Chichikov sees into the mystery of things. He is gifted with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called instress, those moments when the mysterious veil that covers reality is momentarily lifted to
reveal the fingerprints of God in the heart of His Creation. It is, therefore, a luminous joy to see his poetic gifts poured out as an oblation to the wondrous mysteries of the Rosary." —JOSEPH
PEARCE, distinguished Catholic critic and biographer
“St. Augustine said, ‘He who sings well, prays twice.’ Pavel Chichikov's poetry sings and takes us into regions of the Spirit we could never have found ourselves. It is a gift and a grace
of the Holy One." MARK P. SHEA, noted Catholic commentator
“Pavel Chichikov is a master poet who mines the richness of the spiritual and the material, who captures the dynamic movements in the concert of life. His poetry is a skillful tribute to Creation and
Creation's God.” —WILLIAM FERGUSON, editor, St. Linus Review
Meditation and Faith
Kolin on the Mysteries
Together with his first collection of poems, Lion Sun (Grey Owl Press, 1999), Pavel Chichikov’s new book, Mysteries and Stations in the Manner of Ignatius, establishes him as a major Catholic poet in the tradition of St. John of the Cross but with the poetic sensibilities of the Metaphysicals . . . especially George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. His poems are visionary, intensely spiritual, and powerfully Baroque.In fact, if Chichikov’s poems were paintings, they would be a collection of Reubens, Giovanni Bastisa Tiepolos, and Renoirs. Chichikov’s varied poetic patterns are filled with intricate conceits, a range of impassioned speakers, and the imagery of transcendence—birds, flames, wine, angels, and flowers. It would not be unfair to label Mysteries and Stations as an elegiac florilegium for Christ. The size of a pocket calculator or small spiral notebook, Mysteries and Stations is a poetic prayer book for anyone seeking spiritual enlightenment beyond the grave, as one of his poems puts it. Here are spiritual exercises for heart and soul.
Thirty-five poems comprise Chichikov’s collection, five each for the four mysteries of the Holy Rosary, and 14 others, one for each of the Stations of the Cross, plus a concluding poem, “Afterword.” Centuries of libraries have been amassed about the sacred mysteries memorialized in the rosary, and an enormous amount, too, has been written about this litany of prayer since it was founded by St. Dominic almost a thousand years ago. Yet Chichikov may be among the very first to write poems about the Luminous Mysteries, one of the most lyrically beautiful sections of his book. In these Mysteries, as in the three others, Chichikov immerses readers in sacred landscapes, merging reverence with immediacy. The poem for the third decade of this Mystery—“The Proclamation of the Kingdom”—is one of the most complex and prayer-inspiring in the collection. In so many of his poems, whether on the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, Chichikov portrays the essence of the kenosis—the “Christ who comes to cure us takes our shape.” Chichikov’s own poetic humanity/piety is evidenced everywhere, but most noticeably in the wealth of small details he includes in sacred texts—St. Peter glows like Moses when the Paraclete descends; St. Joseph worries about a mouse in the stable at Bethlehem; the women who see Christ pass by them on His way to Golgotha “anoint their heads with dust”; the nails used for the Cross “were sharpened in the factories of hell.”
Like the Metaphysical poets, Chichikov plumbs the truths of faith in deep paradoxes and glorious epiphanies, sometimes one and the same. In “The Agony in the Garden,” the waking apostles learn that “By miseries of hell their heaven’s won.”At “The Crucifixion,” we discover Calvary is “both paradise and hell” and that, like the thieves, “we crave the love of Christ we have denied.” When the Holy Spirit descends in the Glorious Mysteries, the twelve apostles fall while “Flames that do not burn, yet burn them all.” At the Second Station, Christ is “Love condemned, His peace a felony.” When Jesus “Falls the Second Time” (Station Seven), the poet confesses, “I would by death the cure of dying know.” Finally, the most spirit-enthralling epiphany occurs in the Third Luminous Mystery (“The Proclamation of the Kingdom”)—“Wine is Christ, infinity is bread,” something to ponder before receiving the Panis Angelorum.
These poems also capture a chorus of voices woven into the texture of Chichikov’s lines—Christ’s Mary’s, the angels’, even Barabbas’s. For instance, St. Elizabeth tells Mary in the “Visitation” that “Your destiny and mine are interlaced.” Speaking like a courtier from the Kingdom of God, Gabriel, as the “Envoy of the Blessed One,” addresses the Blessed Mother as ”O darling Mary, Mother-virgin, sweet.” But an anxious Mary from the Joyful Mystery on finding the Child in the Temple instructs: "My husband Joseph hurry—find our son.” Seeing His mother on the road to Golgotha in the Fourth Station of the Cross, Christ wonders: “An angel at my side—no it is she.” Veronica piously recalls, “I offered my veil.” Surrounded by the “rabble maddened by the priests” who shout with “Stink of breath, of rage, of something worse,” Barabbas concedes, “I’m the center of it—But who’s the prisoner, this man or me?”
No voice is more prominent here than Chichikov’s himself. He makes the Stations of the Cross alongside Christ—“The wounds are mine, and mine through Him are His” (28). Filled with horrific images and dazzling line breaks, the poems in “Stations” are graphic testimonies of pain, torture, and love—the love of Christ for us and the love of the poet for his Savior—“For as the lashes fell I felt the wounds” (Third Station). Almost inevitably, Chichikov’s verse suggests, with cinematic vividness, a poetic analogue to the horrors of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion. Throughout this section, Chichikov enables us to see, smell, and touch the agony of love that Christ endured for us.
Mysteries and Stations is an important contribution to Roman Catholic meditative poetry, the verse of the spirit crying aloud for union with Christ, both in His suffering and in His glory. My only reservation has to do with the artwork, or lack of it, I should say. Unlike Chichikov’s magnificently illustrated Lion Sun, his second collection really contains no art save for some very simple postage stamp-size drawings separating each of the Mysteries. Yet the striking cover photo of Christ on the cross being offered a sponge filled with gall and wine encourages readers to expect and to desire such glorious visual accompaniment throughout. We must recall that not only is Chichikov a dazzling poet, he is a master photographer. His most recent poems give the glory to God and to us the soul-nourishing reflection to help us to journey both inward and upward.
—PHILIP C. KOLIN, University of Southern Mississippi
The Church of the Kevin
The Church of the Kevin by Kevin O'Brien was named among "The Best Books I Read in 2010..." Ignatius Press Authors, Editors, and Friends, January 1, 2011. Dale Ahlquist lamented "Even though it's only 55 pages long, it seemed shorter."
“The Church of the Kevin” is a short book which uses material from his newsletter for his comedy murder mysteries he performed across the country along with some essays from his blog. Like most humor directed pieces it is hit and miss, but mostly hit. There is a lot of funny stuff contained. I especially liked his re-imagining of “It’s a wonderful life” where Clarence is a materialistic determinist with a major in moral relativism. Another funny bit was his take off on the million monkey-infinite time-Shakespeare meme that takes it in an interesting direction considering how inane the original meme is.
I really liked the essays in the section of the book “Trying to be serious” which combined both humor and critical content, a combination I especially enjoy and one in which Kevin O’Brien pulls off quite well. The Guide to Bad Homilies would have been especially funny if it wasn’t especially true – though we often laugh because something is true. His spending of a Christmas with relatives and the conversations that ensued considering that their points of view did not match Kevin’s in the realm of the Church and morality showed an issue we often come against ourselves along with some commentary on Seinfield and The Office. “How to make bad art” was an essay on the subject close to my heart considering just how much bad Christian/Catholic art there is out there from statues and paintings to film. What Christians are willing to accept as the height of art is quite depressing to me.
The last section included some poems. Now I generally have a poetic tin ear, but I enjoyed Kevin’s poems. Though that might not exactly be a ringing endorsement for him. Here is a sample of one that I really liked.
A Triolet for Pagan-Christians
Oh, come, oh come, enneagram
And save us from His precious love
We pimp ourselves for Fraud and Sham
Oh, come, oh come, enneagram
Who needs the Father, Son, and Dove?
Oh, come, oh come, enneagram
And save us from His precious love
Jeff Miller, http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/
2011/04/kevinapalooza/
The Enclosed Garden
Peter Milward's literary masterpiece, The Enclosed Garden, is a sequel to his epical A Poem of the New Creation. It combines the ideal of Paradise in Solomon's "The Song of Songs" with the magnificent poetic magic of the "pleasure-dome" in "Kubla Khan." As the Biblical setting for the contemplative life, so essential for both religious Jews and Christians, it provides everything that is seriously lacking in the active secular and materialist life of modern Jewish and Christian society.
—DR. PETER J. STANLIS, Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Rockford College
Father Milward is a phenomenon. As one of the world's foremost Shakespeare scholars, he demands respect; as a poet, he deserves the highest praise; as a mystic he desires God in the
everyday things of life; and as a biblical scholar, he has more than half a century of experience as a Jesuit priest as the wellspring for his theological insights. In this volume, the scholar, the
poet and the mystic serve as a triune voice guiding us through the depths and splendours of the Old Testament. Such is the beauty of Father Milward's pilgrimage through scripture that this book can
almost be considered a shrine.
—JOSEPH PEARCE, biographer, writer-in-residence and associate professor
of literature, Ave Maria University
The Letters of Magdalen Montague
When the amoral and cynical J takes up his pen to describe Magdalen Montague, he little realizes the dramatic changes that will soon be wrought in his life. His fascination for this mysterious woman catapults him into a harrowing encounter with Catholicism, conversion, and discipleship. Through the letters, intimate portraits of four souls appear: the loquacious letter-writer J, his virulently anti-religious recipient R , the silently holy Domokos Juhász, and Magdalen Montague herself. The novella boldly addresses themes of grace, faith, evil, sacrifice, spiritual exile, martyrdom of the everyday, and the redemptive power of narrative, all mediated through the deftly-wielded pen of the protagonist. Drawing largely on the traditions of Decadent literature, The Letters of Magdalen Montague presents a profound portrait of humanity's quest for God.
Eleanor Nicholson has written an old-fashioned epistolary novel of religious
awakening and vocation. Set in the heady intellectual and hedonistic milieu of Edwardian England, it mixes elements of Waugh, Wilde, Bernanos, and even a touch of Francis Thompson to
create an intimate account of one skeptic s decisive encounter with the Hound of Heaven. In this short book Nicholson recaptures the energy of a great Catholic literary tradition. —DANA
GIOIA, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts
Magdalen Montague exhales the same exuberant and exotic air as Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde; a delicious vignette that illumines the path from debaucherie to the Divine. —JOSEPH
PEARCE, author of The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde
The Letters of Magdalen Montague as reviewed by DENA HUNT for St. Austin Review (StAR) www.staustinreview.com.
For the literalist, the title of this little book will be misleading. Not a single one of the letters it contains is written by Magdalen Montague. In fact, she does not even appear—at least, not by name—in all the letters, nor is she the subject of them, though she is often mentioned. So why would Nicholson title this book The Letters of Magdalen Montague (my emphasis)?
Only after the reader has finished the book is it possible to ruminate on that question, and then the answer makes clear something never mentioned at all, yet, on reflection, it permeates every page: the mysterious and astonishingly unlimited love and mercy of God.
In the chaos that followed the end of World War II, there was not only a seemingly endless number of displaced persons, but also widespread confusion about such mundane matters as addresses—vacant flats, for example, which had clearly been occupied but the occupants were unknown. Records of ownership had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation. In the Prologue, we learn that in one of those flats in Paris, a packet of letters was found in an attic trunk. Was the owner of those letters—and of the flat—dead? Missing? No one knew. The letters, written in English, are all addressed to “R” and signed by “J”; therefore, ironically, only the name of Magdalen Montague, which frequently appears in the letters, seems to matter. Both the writer and the addressee of the letters are made unimportant by their anonymity, a fact that becomes rather appropriate at the book’s conclusion.
Fiction in the epistolary tradition is difficult to sustain at best, and in this case, it’s made even more difficult by the fact that the correspondence includes only the letters of the writer, “J”; no responses from “R” are included. Nicholson has wisely kept the book brief, even though the period of time over which the letters extend is very broad: 1902–1941. An equally difficult achievement is the transition of the “J” narrator’s voice from the classically “decadent” in the first letter to a nearly saintly voice in the last. If the book can be said to have any flaw at all, it’s the unnatural tone of its decadent voice. It’s not a voice that comes easily to Nicholson, and it shows. Yet, in the end, even this “flaw” works in favor of the novel’s theme, as we come to know the deeper recesses of “J’s” heart.
In fact, we come to know “J” quite well through his letters; we never know anything at all about “R” until one critical detail appears in the Epilogue—which I will not spoil by providing even a hint, though I can say it would do the reader no good at all to “cheat” and skip ahead to the conclusion. And finally we come to know Magdalen Montague, the person, the love of “J”, the inspiration of his life, and the muse of his letters, for these are indeed the letters of Magdalen Montague.
At the end of the novel, with its genuinely surprising little twist, the thoughtful reader will ask, where does that mysterious love and astonishing mercy end? But Magdalen Montague might believe that an even better question would be where did it begin? And that Alpha and Omega will provide much food for thought long after the reader has finished Nicholson’s little book.
DENA HUNT lives in Georgia. Retired from teaching at Valdosta State University, she is working on her second novel.
Print
Recommend this page