Monday, March 21, 2016

John Ditsky

John Ditsky (1938—2006) is a poet, and a literary scholar. He taught at several American universities before settling as an English professor at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, where he spent most of his career. His contribution to studies of American novelist John Steinbeck is extensive, having written several books and numerous essays about his work. Another of John Ditsky's books of literary assessment is: The Onstage Christ: Studies in the Persistence of a Theme.

Ditsky published more than 1300 poems in literary journals and wrote four collections of poetry, including Scar Tissue (1978). He also served for many years as Poetry Editor for Windsor Review.

John Ditsky's papers are archived at Ball State University in Indiana.

On Good Friday

On Good Friday, our Good
Friday, the sun shone
and the frogs sang antiphons;

the geese blew roaster
horns and the skunk cabbage
ruffled upward out of stream
beds. And if this was nearly
all — this and the woodpecker's

prospecting — there would be
more to come. For the Lord
went winking to his grave.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.