Swan, Oliver’s 20th collection, is a slim, lovely volume that explores familiar themes right from the opening line, “What can I say that I have not said before?” In the pages that follow, Oliver goes into the woods, to the shore, and spends time in her home, where her dog Percy wakes her up too early and is always eager for attention. Oliver loves the dog’s antics as much as she loves the natural world, which she observes and records with great care. Many of these poems are among Oliver’s best, and they remind readers that beauty and happiness should be celebrated. In the title poem, Oliver describes a swan and asks these poignant questions: “And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?/ And have you changed your life?”
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
