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Following are excerpts from a seqence of poems titled “Purple Ritual” in Joseph Donahue’s first book of poems, Before Creation (1989). The sequence in much longer and more complex than these passages suggest, but today it seemed important to me to share part of this composition for the record. At…
Read More »“Salmon Sky Above the Mills” by Richard Marion (c) 2013 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net
Read More »Through January 20, 2014, in the Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you can see an outstanding exhibition of watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who is best known for his portraits. Rosemary and I spent the morning at the museum yesterday,…
Read More »An excerpt from “The Lighting Up,” an essay in The Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whitter: Volume II (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866). The essay was first published in book form in 1843 in a collection called The Stranger in Lowell, which brought together several essays that had appeared in a…
Read More »Today’s Guardian online in the UK has a long piece by David Runciman in which he digs deeply into the ways a democratic system of government can be exasperating to its citizens. But, as others have said, Consider the alternatives. Here’s the essay. The insights here apply to the system down…
Read More »I am so encouraged by the many photos of campaign volunteers, especially so many younger people, that have been posted during this campaign season in Lowell, Mass. We don’t know what the results will be tonight after 8 pm, but I have to believe that our civic culture has been…
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But if Thoreau’s first book is flawed, it is a flawed masterpiece. Indeed, as critics have begun to recognize, even if Walden had not been written, A Week would nonetheless stand as one of the seminal works of the American Renaissance. —Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of…
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