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North & South Ireland: Before Good Friday & The Celtic Tiger by James Higgins with an Introduction by Stephen O’Connor, 78 pages, $25 (Loom Press, 2020). A review by Mike McCormick James Higgins’ handsome new book of black-and-white photography captures the Emerald Isle that parents and grandparents of Irish-American baby…
Read More »Historian Paul Hudon is the author The Valley & Its Peoples: An Illustrated History of the Lower Merrimack and a collection of poems, All in Good Time. A former college professor and museum curator, he lives in Lowell. For nine weeks he has been sending his diary entries to the…
Read More »Frank Wagner sends his poems to the Howe blog from his home in Texas. He’s a retired radio newsman. Going Home After Basketball By Frank Wagner Going home after basketball practice meant walking home in the dark. During those months, after the thrill of starting school in the steaming heat…
Read More »Eagle River Virus By Mike McCormick I’m sitting on my deck listening to the ebullient calls of ruby-crowned kinglets as they flit from branch to branch high atop birch and spruce trees. My wife Katy is transplanting geraniums from inside our arctic entry room to outdoor flower boxes. We are…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (8) by Paul Hudon May 31 In Consciousness, his only volume of memoirs, John Updike proposes two life-defining questions. First, Why me? Second, Why here? Identity and place. He paired the right questions, only, being Updike, he put them back to front. Place comes first…
Read More »My co-blogger Marie Sweeney writes about making slumgullion at home. The first time I read that word I knew I had to work it in to a poem. Turns out the dish she makes (and a lot of us make) has a bunch of names. I only knew it as…
Read More »Orchardist and artist Linda Hoffman writes about fruit in this post from her blog on May 31. Blueberries on the way. And here’s her latest post from June 7 about the way water moves on Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Mass. Early Morning Pond View, 2020, watercolor (Linda…
Read More »Jack McDonough had a long career in academic and corporate communications and the media as a writer and editor. He proudly identifies as an “ink-stained wretch.” Our readers know him as an occasional contributor to this blog and as a past essayist for the Sunrise public-affairs radio program at UMass…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (7) by Paul Hudon 24 May, 2020 ‘The fitful apprehension of history’ is a phrase I picked up four years ago come September. Apparently it was coined by Fredric Jameson, “an American Marxist philosopher.” This poses a problem because the phrase could be very…
Read More »Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (6) by Paul Hudon 17 May Today would be Bob’s 95th birthday, my aforementioned brother, the navy guy. He died in November 2013, ‘’in the 89th year of his age.’’ I prefer that antique way of telling a person’s age. It’s more accurate because…
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