Anthony Domestico

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

Nate Klug’s chapbook Beautiful Meteor (The Economy Press, $15, 22 pp.) gets its epigraph and title from a speech Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to Harvard Divinity School’s graduating class of 1838. In it, the ex-Unitarian Emerson criticized institutional Christianity: partly on the grounds that believers must “dare to love God without mediator or veil,” partly because ministers seemed to suggest that, while miracles once happened, they no longer did.

3 weeks ago | chronicle.com | Anthony Domestico

In February 1905 at around 10 o’clock at night, Henry James arrived in Palm Beach. He’d had a long trip — “the railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late,” he writes in The American Scene, his account of the 10-month trip he took to the United States after 20 or so years spent abroad — and much of that trip had been spent dreaming of a meal at the Breakers, the famous luxury hotel to which he was headed. But when James got there, the kitchen was closed.

3 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

“What a tiresome thing a perfectly clear symbol would be.” So declared the painter John Singer Sargent in a letter to his friend, the hostess extraordinaire Lady Elizabeth Lewis. Portraitists of all kinds would do well to live by Sargent’s words. The surest way to kill a portrait is to freight it with too tidy a significance, to straitjacket its subject into a single posture and, in doing so, restrict the play of meanings that characterizes real artistry.

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Thomas Banchoff |Vincent Lloyd |Jessica Swoboda

“Uneasy Equations,” the final poem in Scott Cairns’s latest collection, begins, as so many of his poems do, in the middle of a conversation:I, also, have begun to press each promising page for that elusive form, the likelyshape that might yet serve to at least suggest the rolling spaciousness one suspectsin most prágmata one happens upon—the sea, the shore, even the odd black shelljust now recovered during my morning snorkel.

2 months ago | unionleader.com | Anthony Domestico

”Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” By Adam Plunkett. Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 500 pages. $37. In a 1930 letter, Robert Frost stated his priorities as memorably — which, for Frost, meant as mischievously — as possible: “Am I any good? That’s what I’d like to know and all I need to know.” The goodness referred to here was aesthetic rather than moral.