Research Catalog

Title

The kind of brave you wanted to be : prose prayers and cheerful chants against the dark / Brian Doyle.

Author

Doyle, Brian, 1956 November 6-2017 May 27.

Publication

Collegeville, Minnesota : Liturgical Press, [2016]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xv, 108 pages; 21 cm

Summary

"Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle's The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers. Brian Doyle's uncategorizable form is the brief story dressed like a poem but with the loose lyricism and verve of an essay. Here are chants and litanies, like gentle songs to the sacrament of every moment"--

Uniform Title

Works. Selections

Alternative Title

Works.

Subjects

• Christian poetry, American
• Christian poetry
• POETRY / American / General
• POETRY / Inspirational & Religious
• RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts

Genre/Form

• Poetry
• poetry.
• Poésie.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Acknowledgments. -- That's the kind of brave you wanted to be -- Astigmata -- Holy Thursday -- Your theatrical training -- Poem celebrating the tiny metal flag-holding widget in the shadows on the stage of the lovely old wooden Lincoln Theater in pastoral Mount Vernon, Washington -- The requisite darkness -- The song sparrow -- Goofing the angel -- Poem for my friend Louis -- Sweeney's -- Seamus -- At marine park by Flatbush Avenue, August 1974 -- A Chicago story -- A bride with brass -- Poem on our 28th wedding anniversary -- Summer camp -- Flew -- Down by Fulton Fish Market. -- The morning bus on Halsted Street -- Lily -- Poem for Father's Day -- Poem for the wooden shutters and little mesh grilles in old confessional booths -- Rules for being an altar boy at Saint John Vianney Parish for the liturgical year 1964 -- Such delicious absence -- Learning owl -- Poem in which I am sitting at the Sullivan Square Station on the Orange Line in Boston staring at the old Schrafft's Candy Factory, and contemplating the rubble and smash of an affair with a young lady that has slumped from bad to worse to epically awful, and realizing that even as I am idly pondering the detritus of this terrible affair I am much more interested in the history of the old candy factory than I am in the young lady, which probably explains, very well indeed, why the affair is disastrous, as I am not in love with her at all in the least, which I realize just as the train arrives -- Warming up --
• The tender next minute -- What people gave me one evening in rural coastal Oregon after I told them stories in a lovely tiny library -- Poem for the tall man who interrupted me last night during a reading to say that he didn't much care for what I was reading and could I read my better stuff? -- Poem in which my wife spoons her mother's ashes from a soulless metal box to the beloved old blue cookie jar -- Once in a while we should say what is -- In the sacristy just before the dawn mass -- Pop -- The Usual Perfect Mask -- Poem for My Friend Lee -- Basketball Dads -- Poem for My Friend John Roscoe -- A Tenderness in the World. -- Ten Thousand smiles -- Poem in which Ray Davies and Dave Davies huddle at the top of the staircase at their home in Muswell Hill in London listening to their aunts -- Tyee -- Poem for an editor -- Near Otis, Oregon -- Spectacle -- Poem for a guy I knew in college who was not actually my friend -- Here's what I think when I think about that -- Their raptorish privacy -- The tree surgeon talks about good wood -- The hurling match -- Miraculum -- Just now right now -- How to dress for your wedding -- What we think we forget -- The western yellowjacket : a note -- The peach pie -- The things we say when we have nothing to say -- Poem in which four men, after hauling flowers from a church after a funeral, discuss poetics -- The most arrogant knife -- Poem for a quiet lady at Saint Patrick's Church in Oregon --
• Poem for a friend to whom I wrote every week -- Swagger -- The best rebounder I ever had -- Questions I was asked today by sixth-graders -- Yes -- Finally is a lot futher away than sick ever expected -- Poem in which Dave Kingman hits a home run that is amazingly still traveling 36 years later -- Skiffling shuffling skittering scuffling -- Best day ever -- The first layer of favorite -- Holy and fearsome -- Owls are the bears of the sky -- Whatever it is you think you are chasing, you just ran away from it -- A shy expedition -- Could there be a badger Jesus? -- The antipodean comma -- And then there is this -- Cards that are good for scraping ice off your car -- Poem in which a love letter floats over western South Dakota -- Nailed by wonder -- The slight light -- A swirl of affectionate air -- A poem for literature teacher Beth Morgan of Lassiter High in Georgia -- Poem for Dave McIrvin -- How can you write a poem if you are an essayist? -- After -- Seanchai -- The tale you did not know you needed to know.

ISBN

• 9780814646519
• 0814646514

LCCN

^^2016009626

OCLC

• 934885204
• SCSB-12256511

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library