I urge “imaginative conservatives” to use their imagination in selecting what they choose to read. Instead of wasting time with the toxic triteness of New York Times bestsellers, we need to reward the courage that these adventurous publishers are showing by buying and reading the new and adventurous works that they are publishing.

For almost a quarter of a century I have edited the St. Austin Review, popularly known as the StAR, which aims to promote a Christian cultural revival in the arts. The StAR’s mission, encapsulated in its motto, is “reclaiming culture”. Since The Imaginative Conservative is seeking to do the same thing, I feel that TIC and the StAR are missionary sisters in the quest for cultural renewal or, switching metaphors, that we are brothers-in-arms on a cultural crusade.

Editing the StAR enables me to keep my finger on the pulse of exciting new developments in Christian and primarily Catholic culture. My personal library has a whole section dedicated to contemporary fiction and a separate section dedicated to volumes of contemporary poetry. These dozens of books, published in the twenty-first century, illustrate that something exciting is happening, albeit underground and unnoticed by those in the toxic mainstream.

Since what is emerging in this cultural underground may also be unknown to those “imaginative conservatives” who should be its patrons, I’d like to highlihgt some exciting new authors and the adventurous small publishers who are making their works available.

Let’s begin with three new volumes of poetry published within the past twelve months. Evangeliaries by Philip C. Kolin (Angelico Press) is imbued with a prayerful and liturgical mysticism which interweaves the words and wisdom of the Gospel to enlighten the liturgy of everyday life. It begins with “Beginnings”, the In Principio of Genesis and St. John’s Gospel and ends with a memento mori, a series of meditations on old age and death, and on what awaits us after death’s threshold is crossed. Songs of Desert Winds by William Dunn (Os Justi Press) takes a penetrative delve and dive into darkness, without ever losing sight of redeeming light. What makes Dunn a first-rate poet is the eloquence with which his mystical and philosophical musings, expressed with poignant starkness, oscillate between the consolation of God’s presence and the desolation and darkness of His absence. Versing the Mystery by British poet, Christopher Villiers (Arouca Press) is truly a tour de force. It begins with a section of “Sonnets from the Spirit” which follows the biblical narrative from Genesis to Revelations, reflecting and celebrating salvation history in adroitly disciplined formal verse. The middle section, “Petals of Vision”, displays a more relaxed and personal flowering of the poet’s muse, while the third and final section, “Another Odyssey”, dances between Athens and Jerusalem on a neoclassical pilgrimage to Rome.

Moving from poetry to prose, a new novel by British author, S. P. Caldwell, Lady Mabel’s Gold (Gracewing), is a murder mystery made even more mysterious by the presence of the mysteries of hidden history. Although this is on my desk still waiting to be read, I am happy to recommend it on the strength of Caldwell’s brilliant first novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park, which exhibited the author’s rare gift of suggesting the presence of grace in the most disgraceful situations. The novel I am currently reading is Treason by Dena Hunt, recently published in a new edition by Full Quiver Press, having first been published by Sophia Institute Press in 2013. Having first read it over a decade ago, I am pleased to discover that it is as good as I remember it being. Set during the Tudor Terror in Elizabethan England it brings to vivid and shocking life the age in which Shakespeare lived and in which the English Martyrs died.

Another newly published work of fiction which has really excited me is White Week and Other Stories by the contemporary Polish author Wojciech Chmielewski (Wiseblood Books). The short stories in this volume are immersed in the theology of place, in which the present is always haunted by the presence of the past, not merely in memory but in the living spirit of awakened ghosts. These ghosts of the communist and Nazi past, of the Warsaw Uprising and the Holocaust, cast their shadows on the contemporary cast of characters that Chmielewski paints but always in the light of the suggestive presence of that other ghost, the Holy Spirit. It is this presence which baptizes the most ordinary people, living the most ordinary lives, with extraordinary grace.

While Wiseblood Books should be applauded for making Chmielewski’s contemporary fiction available to the English-speaking world, such applause should also be offered to Ignatius Press for its great work in publishing translations of two classic works of European literature, The Wedding of Magdeburg by Gertrud von le Fort and Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos. Although they were published in German and French respectively in the 1930s, the former is published in English for the first time and the latter is published for the first time in its full unexpurgated and unedited form. They are, therefore, “newly published” in terms of English-speaking readers and warrant inclusion in this brief appraisal of what’s newly emerging from the Christian cultural underground.

In concluding these notes from underground, I need to urge “imaginative conservatives” to use their imagination in selecting what they choose to read. Instead of wasting time with the toxic triteness of New York Times bestsellers, we need to reward the courage that these adventurous publishers are showing by buying and reading the new and adventurous works that they are publishing. The future of the cultural revival is in our hands. Those hands need to be placed in our pockets and our pocketbooks so that we are playing our part in reclaiming the culture from the purveyors of death and decadence.

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The featured image is “Girl Reading in a Landscape” (1896), by Ada Thilén, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.