Books that influenced you

(Transcribed from a combox, and revised)

My top ten books would have to include:

1. Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems: the primary literary influence on my life.

2. Marianne Moore's Complete Prose: a moral as well as a literary influence, the temperament revealed in these pieces is, for lack of a better word, Christian.

3. Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation: the book that brought me back to holy Church.

4. Fr Benedict Groeschel's Healing the Original Wound: one of the books that helps to keep me in holy Church! Vitally important.

5. John Irving's The World According to Garp: a book that planted in my head the dangerous idea that one could be a writer, and nothing else, as one's life-work.

6. Seamus Heaney's Field Work: the book that made me try to write sonnets for the first time!

7. Donald Hall's prose-books about poetry, esp. Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird and Poetry and Ambition: revivifying one's interest in the craft.

8. George F Will's columns from the early '80s were a political influence as I moved to the right.

9. How can I forget Cummings? The poems and the "nonlectures."

The big influences, I think, come when one is susceptible to them! In adolescence and early adulthood. I don't know if anything I've read since age 30 would make the list, because I've read so much before then! The capacity to shock, to move, to change one's life significantly is somewhat diminished.

Poetry news, Catholic news

Dana Gioia is to be the recipient of this year's Laetare Medal from Notre Dame.

Sister Ruth Burrows

How important it is to accept the destruction of our spiritual self-image! When it is endangered, we react like scalded cats. We back off; we scramble around for a way of escape; and then we set about doing what we can to reinstate ourselves. What the Spirit of Jesus asks us to do is lovingly, trustingly to accept the disillusionment. What does it matter that we are shabby and soiled when we have Jesus as our holiness? There is only one holiness, and that is Jesus. His holiness is there for us, and so we can be happy not to have a holiness of our own, one we can enjoy -- it would be illusory anyway.

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Have we not to say that God sacrificed Himself in creating the world, in becoming 'our God'? It is as if self-sacrifice -- which, after all, is the law of all genuine love -- lies in the depths of the Divine Reality, of the Supreme Being who is Love. To be taken into that Love, to live with the life of God, must perforce mean that sacrifice becomes our way of being too. God loved the world so much that He held nothing back from us, not even His own Son. Amen to this priceless gift of him who is made our wisdom, our justification, our holiness and atonement. Nothing is wanting to us. All is given. Strengthen us, O Given One, to be a glad Amen.

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R. Burrows, OCD, Essence of Prayer (HiddenSpring, Paulist Press, 2006), pp. 83-85, passim

Rhotacistic rhyme

A bionic butterfly in the middle of April
Will flutter more quickly than Superman's cape will.

(This couplet was the product of a late-evening "contest" of sorts, where a friend and I were trying to come up with rhymes for words that have no rhymes.)

Quotation : Forgiveness

A quick story: two friends describe their spiritual masters. One boasts, "My master has supernatural powers and can even walk on water." The second replies, "My master forgives all who have harmed him." The first: "Your master is more powerful than mine."

Fr Peter Feldmeier in Not by Bread Alone: Daily Reflections for Lent 2004 (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota), p. 45

Quotation

We hear that love is blind. It isn't. It alone sees, and in seeing it accepts, it celebrates, and above all it embraces.

Fr Peter Feldmeier in Not by Bread Alone: Daily Reflections for Lent 2004 (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota), p. 38