The Case Against Mums

I refuse to plant mums or set them apron-prim in pots along my walk. What have they to say that hasn’t been said before? I prefer autumn’s tawdry mix of unkempt rows, sunflower’s swollen prose; stripped-down lilly’s arcs of green turned shadowy wisps; maple leaves’...

After The Retreat At Weston

Driving back I’m behind a flatbed towing two snowmobiles whose flapping dark cloth fills me with delight – I saw they’d become robes of the Brothers whose voices were like wind chimes, who spoke gospel words as if they belonged in this world, not some other. There...

Miami Beach, 1998

The sleek sculls, each with four rowers and a coxswain skim over the surface, multiple oars pulling the body, unexpected vision of effort in this culture of gentility and ease. I’m on a white-washed deck at my family home, everything kept on track these days by a...
VOICES LIKE WIND CHIMES, a chapbook

VOICES LIKE WIND CHIMES, a chapbook

Reviewed by Charles Butterfield Reading Distler’s collection of short lyrics is like poring over unmatted, unframed watercolor sketches. One suspects the poet knows a thing or two about painting when, in the poem “Duck Harbor,” we read, “We’re greedy too—he for wind...

Review of “At Home With Andre and Simone Weil”

On Wikipedia a Simone Weil biographer writes that she was “a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range.” The entry also says, “Her only sibling was André Weil, who would go on to become one of the greatest mathematicians...