There must be nearly one hundred separate works interpreting the L.D.S. Church for children. A good number of writers, illustrators and publishers turn out these books, and so, while they all aim at teaching the…
The five volume series in world literature edited for the Relief Society by Professors Bruce B. Clark and Robert K. Thomas of Brigham Young University is a landmark production. Not only does Out of the…
At the time of the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in 1830, the religious world generally was antagonistic to the idea of leisure time being spent in any way…
One general statement can be made about the Mormon novels published since 1940: they are as varied as the attitudes about Mormonism and the philosophies about literature. There are books which pretend to be novels…
My knot, my clot, my Utah,
Good gouty wrinkled nurse
Turned dear disease, insufferable
Sweet scurf, my bloat, my fever,
You’re all the pain I am.
And I’ll prescribe our health:
I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend
Not far from where, their age,
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher.
You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine
This was their grandfather,
Yourself a monument now
To probing dry country.
How things really are
we would like to know.
Does Time flow,
or is it atomized
in instants hammered
around the clock’s face?
The mass grave here is set with stones
Piled low inside a low rock wall,
And marked for travelers by a sign
That tells us briefly of the murder
Of six score emigrants, whose bones
Lay here and there once—on the plain,
In the gulley—left to the weather
Of almost a century where they fell—
Leaves and fruit were falling
And I only wanted to know
Why this, of all the trees,
Kept alternating greens
And browns and why it dropped
Those ugly pods and stems—
I only wanted to know
Of the roots, the crazy clutch
That broke the ground, the branches
Let’s see. This morning—since you’ve been gone—
I’ve taken a walk on the beach, naming
And naming and naming, until I can name no more.
Comber, anemone, crab. Will these do?
I talk to myself now—so I’ve found—
As never before, when he’d leave me, often
Now, and now you. I guess I’ll get used
To the feeling. But it’s funny—the way I get thinking