As is fitting, much of the poetry in our spring edition of Ad Fontes deals with beginnings.
First, we have the great privilege of publishing two new poems by Donald Revell, celebrated critic and translator and one of American poetry’s most searching Christian voices. “Both poems,” he says, “arise from my interest in Kierkegaard’s and Barth’s notions of Absolute Beginnings, and in the ways in which these notions might direct the poetic line.” When I read with that hint in mind, I notice how the sense of each enjambed line in “One Shore” seems to taper off in uncertainty, only to renew itself as if by a leap of faith: “In the matter / Of flowers, all there is to say draws, momently, / Meanings too brief for color. Think insect / Wings.” Each new line is more than a function of the sentence it continues. Another spirit breathes into it.
Eric Hutchinson, unofficial house poet of Ad Fontes, reflects on Easter as a beginning to the year. The repetitions and echoes in this terse six-line piece figure the cyclical frustration of unredeemed time. He flatly dismisses the notion of moral progress: “Time leads to death. It passes; nothing more.” Hope lies not in a future culmination but in a sudden irruption into the past: “the time that time was pierced by love.”
Hutchinson’s debt to the deceptive plainness of George Herbert (explicit in his second poem, “Love’s Welcome”) links him to the next author in this section, Steven Searcy. “Since Adam is my dad, / I duck and hide,” he writes in “Response.” It is hard to imagine a more poignantly succinct formulation of original sin. His “Kitchen Abstraction” is worried about origins too. In gently modulating meter and interlaced rhymes, this poem finds arcane sacrifice behind all culinary activity: “The harvest and the slaughter / happened some other place, with other hands.”
Other fine images of beginning appear in the selection. In Stewart Lindstrom’s “Baptism,” it is the orienting memory of immersion, still fresh beneath the “detritus” collected in the quest for love; in Travis Wright’s “Zero Sum Game,” it is “the prophet’s womb,” from which God brings linear time to birth.
To my mind, the contributions of Tober Corrigan and Charles Mines evoke not so much cosmic beginnings as the dynamics of youth. The wilderness call of Moses never comes for Corrigan’s young prophet—he turns out to be only a green outdoorsman who cannot make a fire. Mines goes the other way, finding unexpected strength in youth. In his poem, guitar prodigy Giulio Regondi flees the stage after his performance, but his composition itself exudes a contrasting maturity, an andante confidence that “even the best obituaries won’t cover.”
We are very pleased to share these poems with you as we observe the spring season and a new beginning for Ad Fontes.
Josh Patch, Associate Editor for Arts & Poetry
One Shore
Its needle slow to draw, this moment
Is: blood flowering ampule; authority
Of one Paul; next to nothing. In the matter
Of flowers, all there is to say draws, momently,
Meanings too brief for color. Think insect
Wings. Butterfly hastens the book, black,
Then white, then black. I was beside a lake
And saw the water folded, falling neatly
Into place, a needle’s whisper. I saw
Christ’s authority inscribed in oil,
Black on the waters. One shore, and yet
So many apostles, you could barely move,
Barely catch a glimpse of the book surfacing
Far out for just a moment. Whiteness
Circled the black place instantly.
Where the Willow Bends
Some final tree, bent double, shapes sweet William
And a vineyard woman. No applause
For theologians and no pomp for the crawl of words
Into the parables. These are significance
Itself, alone among the couples
And their drifting combs, their loose fragrances.
How to speak of hair where the willow bends?
How Christ to Peter: “love me more than these”?
Insects pass through glass as through thin air.
It’s a matter of conscience, every passage
A radio thrown into traffic
Where the noise becomes dirt teeming with sparkles
Until, and the rain only naked later,
Much later and no pomp. The fanfare belongs
To the cabbage moth hissing sodium,
Turning night into day. Love me more than these.
Easter
Every year I think I will improve,
At last less selfish than the year before,
Supposing time will suit me more for love.
Time leads to death. It passes; nothing more.
Except the time that time was pierced by love,
Remain we dead and changeless as before.
Love’s Welcome
“Why will you die?”
“We know not why;
But sin tastes sweet.
Now give us meat.”
“I give you bread
From heaven instead.”
“We want a treat.
So give us meat.”
“It will not last.
Recall the past
And Eve’s defeat.”
“Hush. Give us meat.”
And so it went
Till heaven sent
Our Mercy Seat,
Whose flesh is meat.
“But, Lord, we’ve marred
Your hands, so scarred
By our deceit.”
“Sit; taste my meat.”
Kitchen Abstraction
Smooth and white and hard,
the countertops are cleared and washed with water
where tender flesh was sliced and pared, to hide
the necessary fact that something died—
a grain, a grape, a lamb.
The harvest and the slaughter
happened some other place, with other hands—
here, hands can sort and sear in stainless steel
then gently rinse, without having to feel
the strain of sacrifice.
To mute the grim demands
of sustenance, the blades that cleave and trim
are cleaned and sheathed meticulously. Still,
the solemn law remains—that life must spill
from life to nourish life.
Response
I can’t admit I’ve wrecked
things yet again.
Deny, defend, deflect—
I dodge and fight to save my skin—
what else could you expect?
Admit the charge is fair,
the harm is real?
That’s more than I can bear.
The verdict: guilty, no appeal.
The sentence: pure despair.
Since Adam is my dad,
I duck and hide.
I know, I know—it’s sad
but true. Shame’s gates are open wide.
It really is that bad.
But, like the first time, you
are not content
to leave me. You pursue
and call my name. You won’t relent.
And no, you can’t eschew
the consequence and curse
of what’s been done,
but open up your purse
to fund my care, and one by one
you dress my wounds. You nurse
me, patient with my slow
and halting pace.
I’m hesitant. You know,
of course. You look me in the face.
You will not let me go.
Baptism
Four times I tried to marry,
three times I kept only the detritus:
A cribbage board, a quilted jacket,
and Kafka’s stories, collected in paperback.
The fourth time, I succeeded.
But for this romance, I have nothing to show,
Only a memory I will always cherish:
How I came up laughing from the cold water.
The Benefit of Being a Puritan
For Cambridge Presbyterian Church
Despite its grateful damages
I confess to my father’s name
in droves, a crestfallen wreck awake
one hundred years before notice
of his death. Four hundred years
this Sunday someone else
also left his flat in the rain to play
a posthumous part in this
endless foxtrot. He also missed
the first hymn, and the call
to worship, but the first Psalm hit him
too the way the sun sets
in his daughter’s room. I will
miss this, he thought.
Zero Sum Game
First he built the prophet’s womb
in code that cannot be rewritten
for us in the language of mathematics.
Very well, he thought. Now prayer
for the past will be impossible
to ask. Then the limits will set in
on their bodies in a gust of logic,
and from the silence of belief
I will teach them how to repent
to the land, rather than rape it.
That would be right, he said.
If in the interregnum, they woke
in their original weakness
to find twice the light Adam lost.
Crying Faith
Crying faith
in a wilderness
usually leads to doubt
very quickly. It’s not
the anarchic echoes
that turn you Thomas,
but the selfish silence
after, of a mocking nature,
as it makes quick work
of your inability to burn
a bush.
Regondi Etude No. 6
Because it was Regondi,
orphaned and forced,
who ran off in fright
the first time applause roared from the audience.
And it’s Etude No. 6 which almost—
could be interpreted
as slugs of wine or
reels of memory,
as café emptiness,
or the monsignor
with his head in his hands.
Like something even
the best obituaries won’t cover:
figuring the strength
of the instrument,
delineating what it means
(‘walking pace’),
reasons for that speed.
Contributors
Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of Canandaigua (2024) and White Campion (2021), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Sudden Eden: Essays; Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Poetry editor for both Colorado Review and The Mountain West Poetry Series, Revell also serves on the editorial board of The Test Site Poetry Series (University of Nevada Press). Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, he is now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Revell divides his time between Enterprise, Nevada and Geneva, New York.
E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College and Director of Hillsdale’s Collegiate Scholars Program. His poems have previously appeared in various fora in print and online.
Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age, Southern Poetry Review, New Verse Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Georgia.
Stewart Lindstrom spends his days teaching Latin to middle schoolers at Nova Classical Academy, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, the same city where he grew up. He lives with his wife Michaela, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. Stewart spends his weekends and his summers reading avidly, writing novels, and taking long walks beneath the sight of heaven with his wife and his cherished childhood friends.
Travis Wright is Assistant Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Patrick Henry College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Prism Review, Cambridge Elemental Poetry, The Bangalore Review, The Windhover, and Dappled Things, among others. He is the author of A Woodland Lexicon (Little Gidding Press, 2025).
Tober Corrigan works in the cybersecurity industry by day and tinkers with his poems by night. He currently lives (and shares poetry) in Baltimore, enjoying an historic row home with his wife and two Texas rescue dogs, both with energy and scruff to spare.
Charles Mines is a writer in Atlanta, GA. His fiction and poetry have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Streetlight, The Brussels Review, and more.
