@
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Lynnell Edwards reviews
Maurice Manning
Bucolics
Harcourt
James A. Lee reviews
Paul West
Sheer Fiction,
Volumes I–IV
McPherson & Company
“West is opinionated and passionate
about the written word—a proud,
truly serious prose artist.”
“Manning has made a startling and
complex contribution to the long
tradition of the pastoral.”
Chad Parmenter reviews
Scott Cairns
Short Trip to the Edge:
Where Earth Meets Heaven—
A Pilgrimage
Louis McKee reviews
Gordon Ball
Dark Music
Cityful Press
“Dark Music is a surreal blend of
memories and dreams, moments
out of time.”
HarperSanFrancisco
“Cairns’s ability to render his journey in
vivid, accessible terms will make it moving
to readers from any tradition of belief.”
Annette Gilson reviews
Elise Blackwell
The Unnatural History of
Cypress Parish
Joan Frank reviews
Valerie Miner
After Eden
University of Oklahoma Press
“‘Heavy on message’ would
understate the case. It’s a
relentlessly goodhearted message.”
Richard Kostelanetz reviews
Kitasono Katue
Edited by Karl Young and John Solt
Translated by John Solt
Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space:
Selected Poems of Kitasono Katue
Unbridled Books
“The human past is not the only
realm that can be eclipsed by the
floods caused by nature and by
human complacency.”
Thomas F. Dillingham reviews
John Ridland
A Brahms Card Ballad:
Poems Selected for
Hungarians
Dowitcher Press
“The only possible complaint
about the book is that it includes
too few of Ridland’s poems.”
Highmoonoon Books
“Katue was first-rank.”
LineOnLine announces reviews
featured exclusively on ABR’s website.
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Innovation Never Sleeps
May–June 2008
29.4
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Pastoral without Nostalgia
Bucolics
Maurice Manning
Harcourt
http://www.harcourtbooks.com
122 pages; cloth, $23.00
With his third book, Maurice Manning has
made a startling and complex contribution to the long
tradition of the pastoral, one that at once confirms
the divine integrity of rural life while prodding the
metropolitan reader into close self-examination.
Conventionally, the argument of a bucolic (Virgil,
Theocritus) is for the superiority of rural life over
the urban. Not in classical literature a religious form,
the bucolic, and its kin the eclogue and the idyll, is
typically awash in frolicking satyrs and nymphs,
shepherds and shepherdesses, often engaged in pagan
rites. Christians reclaimed these pagan works by allegorizing a message of the Good Shepherd, though
the fundamentally humanist value at their center
persisted on through British neoclassicism (Edmund
Spenser, Alexander Pope) and Romanticism, (John
Clare) in a complex tradition that at once idealized
the rural for urban audiences while complicating
(particularly in Clare) the political realities of a diminishing rural culture.
Manning has made a startling and
complex contribution to the long
tradition of the pastoral.
A more ancient tradition of the shepherd singing
comes from the Psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures, and
the intimate and opaque God of David seems to be the
most obvious model for Manning’s “Boss” to which
each of the untitled, unpunctuated, single stanza poems in this collection is addressed. But the equation
of Manning’s work with the Psalms of David is not
entire. There are no lamentations of deep despair, nor
petitions for a rain of coal and fire on the heads of his
enemies. Neither are there exuberant cries of praise
nor exhortations of great fear. Manning’s speaker
addresses, and most often questions, his Boss as he
is moved by his observations of the rural world as
he puzzles through his place in it.
Manning’s servant is made in the image of
his Boss; they both enjoy a good joke, labor in the
same field:
you’re a workhorse Boss like me
you work the pump I work
the bucket fair enough
we’re tough as leather Boss
tough as nails we go
together don’t we…
But he longs for a Boss who is silent:
you get so hushed up Boss
my ears get lonely I wish
you’d let me hear from you
sometime I wonder what
you’re up to Boss up there
Lynnell Edwards
Who demands backbreaking and sometimes futile
labor:
I’ve dug
the rocks I’ve dragged
the heavy log around
I’ve ironed it out all right
not a wrinkle in sight O
isn’t that enough Boss
Who wearies his servant with riddling ambivalence:
now I know behind
that cloud you’ve got your fingers crossed
you’re hiding something Boss don’t fool
with me is it a reason or
a riddle I’m getting tired of all
your games I’ve had it up to here
Who holds his servant’s life in his hands:
will I smell smoke before you shake
the light from me before you pinch
my little flame into a hiss.
And, while the speaker’s idiomatic phrasing
and his preference for the literal may belie his education and place in the world, he is not simple. His
figures and logic suggest a nascent metaphysics of
the greater Natural Order. And he understands how
the divine and the human are joined in Creation:
you save a seed for me you sow
it in the furrow of my eye
as if seedtime Boss is a little bit
like sleep I think inside my eye
you keep a little patch of green.
If Manning threatened to exhaust his well of
rural and specifically central Kentucky imagery in
A Companion for Owls (2004) (a book whose chief
persona, D. Boone, is also troubled by the prospect
of an ambivalent and fickle Creator), then in this
collection he is marvelously inventive with the same
pastoral imagery. The blackbird, the summer field,
the stones, the river, the leaf swirling in the creek; the
simple implements of agriculture: the hoe, a wagon
wheel, the “salty harness,” a bucket, a fence post;
all strike the perfect idyllic note without lapsing into
nostalgia. This is critical in constructing an uncompromised pastoral mood, one which is evoked largely
for an urban audience, not rural folk themselves who
actually live out the bone crushing fatigue and brute
servitude of tenant-based agriculture.
The short, unpunctuated lines hum at a perfect
iambic pace, occasionally disrupted for effect, as in:
“to smell the smoke like burnt light shook.” And the
music, created by strong internal and occasional end
rhymes, attention to lyrical assonance, propels each
poem forward as effortlessly as breath. Manning’s
willingness to indulge phrasing for its sound value
primarily (“your horse is made of silver Boss / it clips
like sleep it clops like you”) is a delight.
But this is not a conception of the Creator, or a
model for prayer that will engage everyone, or even
all Christians. Further, this is a dialogue unapologetically between a man and his (male) God, and
it is more beautiful for this intimacy. Finally, there
is a deeply conservative notion about the nature of
service to God that will trouble some (if, in fact, the
implied tenant/landowner relationship is not already
Detail from cover
problematic):
I couldn’t boss myself too well
I couldn’t even try I need
someone to tell me what to do
someone to say let’s fetch the hoe
and,
I like it when you hold
me back I like it when you jerk
the reins I know the gee or haw.
The back cover praise suggests a dense web of
allusion and literary layering, and Manning’s peer
readers certainly will hear the resonance of John
Donne’s “Batter My Heart,” in “you rattle me you
knock me down,” or the Christian mythology of
“Good King Wenceslas” in:
do you know my favorite winter tale
I laid a wet lamb in a barrel
I put my coat around it Boss
I hummed it through the night that night.
But the illusion of the persona precludes this kind of
self-conscious intentionality, and we are left to puzzle
out the relationship between Manning’s constructed
rural persona and the implied author of the poems.
Thus, the question of Manning’s ironical intent:
Does Manning believe this? About his God? About
his servant?
Throughout, the perfectly metered apostrophes
to Boss and Manning’s clever play with the word boss
(it is as likely to appear as verb, common noun, or
adjective as it is proper name) suggest a sly questioning sprung from complex and existential doubt, the
note on which the collection ends: “O tell me why
I can’t hold back / this bitter thought are you the
bee / or just a stinging story Boss.” Boss, of course,
never answers this or any of the questions his servant
poses directly; Boss’s very existence depends on faith
alone, though the sum of the speaker’s observations
suggests a very real presence in his life.
But, if in fact good poetry often makes for
subversive theology—consider the ways in which the
best religious poetry from “The Song of Solomon”
to Paradise Lost (1667) through Emily Dickinson
tends toward the undoing of conventional religious
hierarchies and values—then we are left, all of us
city folk, with the problem of the “stinging story,” or
that possibility that religion is a kind of confidence
game. Presuming Manning has taken a non-ironical
stance toward his persona, however, what emerges
is a recovery of the best tradition in the pastoral: a
proposal for the integrity of rural life, and for those
who labor in it, answers to the questions they rightly
ask. And for we urbanites, perhaps courage to seek
our own answers.
Lynnell Edwards’s second full-length collection of
poetry is The Highwayman’s Wife (Red Hen Press,
2007). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she
teaches at the University of Louisville.
May–June 2008
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Mystical Memoir
Short Trip to the Edge:
Where Earth Meets Heaven—
A Pilgrimage
Scott Cairns
HarperSanFrancisco
http://www.harpercollins.com
272 pages; cloth, $22.95
If Short Trip to the Edge were given another
genre, aside from religion, it might be in the unnamed
category of prose that poets have written about their
lives. This category took on a specific kind of complexity in the last century. Two prose works came
from poets contemporaneously—Robert Lowell
starts his autobiographical explorations in Life Studies (1959) with the prose of “91 Revere Street,” and
John Berryman captures his battle with alcoholism
in Recovery: A Novel (1971). In both cases, the prose
surprises with its matter-of-factness. The straightforward persona taken by each author recalls Berryman’s description of W. H. Auden, in Auden’s prose:
“a guy talking it out.” The same, transparent person
narrates self-descriptive prose by poets in subsequent
decades—James Dickey’s Self-Interviews (1984),
Nick Flynn’s recent Another Bullshit Night In Suck
City (2004), and the much-anticipated memoir from
Alex Lemon. The prose seems to offer formlessness,
where poetry offers form; the poets seem to find a
needed immediacy, and a corollary intimacy with the
reader. Scott Cairns draws on this same connectivity
in Short Trip to the Edge, which also takes on the
qualities of travel guide, spiritual bildungsroman,
ars poetica, and, with its use of his poetic gifts,
poem. In talking out his travels over Mount Athos,
the mountain considered sacred to followers of the
Greek Orthodox faith, he’s setting new standards for
the poet’s memoir, of vivid description, emotional
clarity, and a sense of closeness to the reader born
from both.
Cairns’s ability to render his journey
in vivid, accessible terms will make it
moving to readers from any
tradition of belief.
Those who know Cairns primarily through
his poetry will find Short Trip to the Edge a great
companion work. Likewise, readers finding him for
the first time in the memoir will have a wonderful
guidebook to the fascinating terrain of his poems.
The new poems in Philokalia (2002), his most recent
collection, include a series titled “Adventures in New
Testament Greek,” exploring Greek words in their
original meanings. There, Cairns discusses how the
word “nous,” roughly translated as “mind,” has been
stripped of its meaning by Western conceptions of the
mind. The poem’s focus on the breath and the spirit
not only expands the understanding of “nous,” but
connects the idea of mind to the physical and spiritual
dimensions of the human. In the memoir, “nous” is
defined as a part of the person “able to perceive itself,
perceive God, and rightly perceive creation.”
Just as the poems offer a return to the origins of
Christian language, Short Trip to the Edge takes us to
the literal origins of the Christian church, narrating
Cairns’s trip to Mount Athos, the Greek peninsula
considered holy to followers of the Greek Orthodox
tradition. The memoir follows Cairns on three successive trips to Mount Athos, and, along the way, into
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American Book Review
Chad Parmenter
the necessary detours of any pilgrimage: the past, the world, and the soul.
His descriptions of all of them come
through vividly, remaining beautiful,
accessible, and authentic. The details
of the pilgrimage manage warmth,
humor, and a sense of the sacred, all
at once. The monasteries come to life
through masterful description, as in the
monastery of Vatopedi, where a priest
shows him how monks are buried,
once they’ve passed on:
“Come,” he said, “meet my
future roommates.” Father Matthew led us along a narrow
plank between heaps of human
bones. Along the right side of the
plank, three other rows of planks
reached a good thirty feet; along
each of these, the skulls of more
than a thousand monks had been
carefully placed side by side.
Some were gray, some white,
some were very nearly black;
a great many were the color of
beeswax candles.
The scene is anything but macabre—
Cairns’s subtle gift for depiction renders it beautiful to our imaginations.
Throughout the narrative, descriptions
are offered with this same, gentle
scintillance, showing the mastery of
imagery that infuses his poetry, and a sense of the
scene being communicated to a reader within the
writer’s reach.
Cairns’s ability to render his journey in vivid,
accessible terms will make it moving to readers from
any tradition of belief. He takes us into the deepest
reaches of the faith—the confessions; the midnight
services in ancient monasteries; and otherworldly
contact with icons like the incorruptible hands of
saints, still warm to pilgrims’ touch. The fact that
they come across so movingly is a testament to his
ability to draw the reader in, and to tell a great story.
One of the most unforgettable scenes shows a pilgrim
dropping the wine and bread offered to him for communion, and the haunting, beautiful aftermath:
And this is what I beheld: for the next
half hour—during which time I barely
breathed—the priest picked up every possible bit of the elements…. [H]e picked
up every stray bit of anything he found on
the marble floor, be it the Holy Mysteries
or candle wax, lint or speck of mud, and
placed it in his mouth…. Another monk
arrived with a glass vessel, from which
the priest poured an abundance of thick
liquid. He then set a lit taper to the pool,
and the entire marble floor before the
royal doors came alive with blue flame.
Cairns’s descriptive abilities render this experience,
too, in unforgettable, naturalistic terms. He doesn’t
need to remind the reader that the flames evoke the
biblical rendering of Pentecost; he keeps us grounded, there on the holy mountain. The divine and down
to earth are united brilliantly at the end—when he
says, of his goal to find a life in prayer, “I can say that
I have tasted it,” the reader can taste it, too.
Cairns’s ability to connect with the reader may
come partly from his poet’s ability to render feelings as facts. Where Lowell and Flynn’s memoirs
tend mostly to vivid scenes that metaphorize their
inner states, leading us to the brink of their feelings,
Cairns takes us over. He offers frank discussion of
the emotion that, for him, is essential to connection
with the spirit. The poetry that intersperses his prose
injects an intensity of emotive language, showing
its power in a setting enhanced by the poet’s autobiography. Discussions of poetry as an art give the
narrative a sense of ars poetica, too, that’s also down
to earth, movingly describing the reasons for reading
and writing it in terms rendered both universal and
tangible by the surrounding narrative. The poem that
ends the memoir also takes its title, “Short Trip to
the Edge,” and captures the book’s journey, with a
breathtaking ending:
The enormity spun,
and I spun too, and reached across what must
have been its
dome.
When I was good and dizzy (since it was so
near), I went
home.
The rhythm and rhyme here, rarely this conspicuous in Cairns’s poetry, give the lines the power
of mystical incantation. Their form indicates that the
journey of the memoir, in its explorations, of poetry,
faith, and their roots in the spirit, have transformed
their speaker. Cairns’s gifts make this transformation
the reader’s, too. With this contribution to the canon
of poets’ writings on personal history, he’s taken the
whole subgenre to a place of deeper feeling, and on
to the territory of the spirit. It may belong to a category of literature that can’t be named; Cairns goes
into this nameless category of literature with skill
and wisdom, making for a reading experience that’s
bound to be transformative.
Chad Parmenter’s work has appeared in The Harvard
Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and is
forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2007.
Eco-Humanitarianism Parable
After Eden
Valerie Miner
University of Oklahoma Press
http://www.oupress.com
248 pages; cloth, $24.95
Valerie Miner, author of seven novels, three
story collections, and two books of nonfiction, has
written her latest novel in a prose style perhaps best
described as responsible. Its protagonist, Emily Adams, is a pensive, fifty-year-old regional planner who
lives and works part of each year in Chicago (with
her longtime female partner, a musician), spending a
“few weeks each summer” in an ecologically correct
cabin in Northern California’s lovely Mendocino
County. The two co-own the land with a small group
of similarly minded women who live in comparably
tiny, tucked-away cabins, and who respectively do
all kinds of good—far too much good, I fear, to ring
realistic. They bake, teach, coach, tutor, organize,
volunteer, cook and sew, garden, paint, build, make
art, midwife, play softball, and still find time to
support one another at every level: a multitasking,
mini-Berkeley commune in the Mendo hills.
Following the sudden loss of her beloved
partner—an early plot turn that feels stagey in its
abruptness—Emily must decide when, and whether,
to pack up and go back to Chicago; ultimately, she
must come to terms with grief and re-engage Life
and Love. A vengeful arsonist and vagaries of romance add sub-threads to a story which meanders
comfortably (with Emily) among its principals: the
little group of intrepid women, their partners and
visitors, Mexican Americans, Native Americans,
religious fundamentalists, Emily’s brother Michael
(an amicable lawyer who rather conveniently has
plenty of money), children, animals, and of course,
the land itself.
Most of the exposition arrives in big clumps,
bagged in nets of Emily’s musings: country versus
city, textures of seasons, right livelihood, family,
aging and mortality, geography and weather, history,
indigenous archeology (Emily finds Pomo Indian
relics on her property), sexuality and relationship,
clear-cutting, marijuana versus viticulture, outdoor
privies, wildlife, special recipes. Miner has lived
part-time in the area for fifteen years (noted in the
acknowledgments) and done exhaustive research:
Okay, so human settlement was never
victimless. But there were degrees of
encroachment. Worse in many ways than
the farmers and ranchers were the damn
timber companies. For decades Louisiana
Pacific, Masonite, and other firms had
been stripping the hillsides raw. At least
the Indians and the European farmers
lived directly off the land. The timber
barons kidnapped whole corners of the
environment.
................................................................
Of course she and Salerno (and Virginia
and Ruth and Lindsey) represented yet
another observable social phenomenon—
middle-aged professionals who had
saved enough money to build a weekend
Joan Frank
getaway or who had relocated from the
fast track to pursue their art and baking
and politics and furniture making. You
couldn’t help being affected by the natural
beauty here. As a regional planner she was
curious about how each community, each
individual, responded to the geography
differently and altered the landscape in
large or small ways.
This writing means to teach. It is thoughtful and
careful, grammatical and clear. It is also curiously
flat-footed; it lacks music, surge, and also (paradoxically) the tensile irony of a sensibility aware of its
own exertions, that marks a fictive voice. It’s also
nonstop telling, telling, telling. In “As a regional
planner she was curious” we hear the incongruously
crisp, public-service agenda, a docent’s explicative
voice. Perhaps sensing the danger of lapsing into
constant lecture-mode, Miner works to not stint
on story. Main characters form a lovable, if thin,
ensemble. Sensory details are plentiful and homey:
meals eaten, walks taken, flora and fauna admired,
fragrances breathed, music savored, comfort found
in friends and wilderness. The novel seems to want
to gently steer readers toward a quality of reflection
that, by implication, will awaken a reinvigorated
practice of moral action on the planet.
“Heavy on message” would
understate the case. It’s a
relentlessly goodhearted message.
A mouthful? Yes. A bookful. Miner has also
declared, both on her website and in this book, an
abiding fascination with the idea of home:
This year [Emily] had become interested
in—no, obsessed by…issues of home and
ownership and trespassing…. She had
learned that the Pomos had held onto their
territory longer than many coastal Indians
because the Spanish had trouble making
landfall on this resistant shore. She had
read about conflicts between Russian and
British settlers. Maybe she was writing
this conference paper from…a need to
understand place, to claim home.
My problem with the above virtuous themes
and issues is that they are packed into these pages
so heavy-handedly and, alas, so artlessly. Here is a
typical passage:
She glanced uncertainly at the bouquet of
roses on the adjacent seat. Hard to decide
what to bring country people, who grew
everything. She had considered a bag of
Nyland apples, delicious at this time of
year, but for all she knew Judson Sands
owned an orchard. Clearly he was a Renaissance man, with his civil service job
in Ukiah, his Vietnam vet activism, his
almost-finished Ph.D. in Native American Studies at Berkeley, his community
organizing at the rancheria, to say nothing about his commitments as husband
and father.
This is shopping-list writing. One can’t but
wonder: anything else the man does? First violin?
Unitarian bake sale?
Moreover, while Miner offers pretty descriptions of nature, the writing’s tone—through Emily’s
ruminations, a wistful, contemplative earnestness—
seems to homogenize perception. Clichés occur. Adverbs abound. People don’t “say” words in conversation; they “sigh” them or “argue,” “explain,” “shrug,”
“challenge,” “persist,” “demur,” “cajole,” “grin,”
“pronounce,” even “hypothesize” them. Dialog rings
cheeky or preachy, sometimes dry as if cribbed from
a textbook, sometimes just plain purple. Does anyone
you know talk this way at the beach?
“Look at that,” [Ruth] said meditatively.
“The powerful grey swell rising in an
endlessly grey ocean, racing in a frenzy
toward shore, as if seeking harbor. Instead
of resting in the caves, the waves rush out
again, succeeding only in chipping away
the coast to which they’ve been so magnetically drawn. If only I could capture
that raw drama in a photograph.”
Here is a walk in the redwoods:
As they padded deeper into the grove, the
ground was softer, damper…. Michael
had the same hushed reaction…. They
proceeded together and separately. Well,
perhaps not separately so much as silently,
for walking with another in the embrace
of these ancients was a kind of worship,
the experience heightened, deepened, by
the sharing.
Oh, no! I’m myself a devout Northern Californian, but please! No sharing!
After Eden reads, finally, like a kindly parable
or illustrative tract urging eco-humanitarianism,
starring any number of hopelessly sweet exemplars
(winks, quips, shoulder massages their currency)
and studded with tasty particulars: organic food,
craft fairs, school musicals, dogs and deer, flowers
and trees, fog and ocean, wine by the woodstove.
(I learned from publicity materials, after writing
this review, that Miner intended this novel to be a
“revision” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost [1667].)
Miner’s issues, like most of its backstory and exposition, feel told rather than shown, and overwhelming
in number. “Heavy on message” would understate
the case. It’s a relentlessly goodhearted message.
But there’s an unkind adage among writers about
messages, having to do with telegrams.
Joan Frank’s recent novels are Miss Kansas City
and The Great Far Away. She lives and writes in
Northern California.
May–June 2008
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Japanese Avant-Garde
Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space:
Selected Poems of Kitasono Katue
Kitasono Katue
Edited by Karl Young and John Solt
Translated by John Solt
Introduced by Karl Young
Highmoonoon Books
http://www.highmoonoon.com
227 pages; paper, $30.00
in a variety of experimental ways only some of
which I’d seen before. In summary, this book
includes what we would not call prose poems
(oddly called “Conical Poems,” 1933), visual
poems, picture poems, minimal poems, modular
poems, poly-directional poems, poem objects,
and haiku among other Japanese forms.
The greatest poem, at least in translation,
that gives this book its title for its third stanza
reads:
blue
triangular
mustache [sic]
’s glass
One recurring truth in the history of contemporary avant-garde literature is that many
major figures are first and even best recognized
in countries other than their own. Just as James
Joyce established his reputation in France and
England, rather than his native Ireland, so Kitasono Katue (1902–1978), by common consent
the most distinguished experimental Japanese
poet of his generation, earned stronger recognition in Europe and America.
white
triangular
horse
’s parasol
black
triangular
tobacco
’s building
Katue was first-rank.
Even though Ezra Pound encouraged and
connected him, and then chapbooks appeared
here as long ago as the 1950s, only Oceans
Beyond Monotonous Space will give Englishreading readers a full sense of his achievement.
The heroic servants behind this volume are the
translator John Solt and the avant-garde webmeister Karl Young, both of them editing, Solt
translating, and Young introducing with the
thoughtfulness and provocation typical of his
extended critical writing.
The surprises are that Katue was the pen
name for Hashimoto Kenkichi, who worked as
a librarian at a dental college, and that he wrote
yellow
triangular
star
’s handkerchief
My single favorite text is an elaborately described short play, “Tobacco of the Future,” that
belongs in every anthology of that genre. Strictly
by the avant-garde measure of formal exploration,
Katue was first-rank.
Another recent anthology of a foreign writer
known only in part, Today I Wrote Nothing: The
Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms (2007), portrays
a considerably less experimental writer than was
previously suggested by selections published over
An Egghead Geezer
Sheer Fiction, Volumes I–IV
Paul West
McPherson & Company
https://www.mcphersonco.com
854 pages; cloth, $75.00
Somebody somewhere observed that “most
fiction-reviewing is stolid, stodgy, and minimalist….” In the same piece (same paragraph, in fact),
the stylistically gifted and prolific wordsmith blasted
the “many-degreed” academic reviewers who favor
“dry, clipped banality” over the rich language and
free-roaming imagination this same gentleman
prefers.
In my (admittedly less extensive) experience,
the above is all too true.
And so, fellow readers, please consider my trepidation—faced with the prospect of wading through
a four-volume set (over 800 pages, folks) reprinting
the review, speeches, essays, and all-around literary
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American Book Review
Richard Kostelanetz
musings of a certain serious novelist that I’d vaguely
heard of, but never read.
Cringe with me now, my friends.
CRINGE.
Okay.
Now that I (we?) have gotten that out of my
(our?) system(s), take heart!
For the above “somebody” is Paul West, the
“somewhere,” the preface to the newly released
(unleashed?) fourth (and apparently final) book in
this rather amazing and invigorating series. While
West attended Oxford and Columbia University, and
later taught (just up the road from me) at Penn State,
the man’s writing shows him to be the antithesis of
ossified stuffiness.
These books display a wide-ranging intellect,
erudite and exceptionally well read. West is opinionated and passionate about the written word—a proud,
truly serious prose artist. And he’s troubled, to the
point of raging despair, by the decline of interest (in
America, at least) in his sort of literature. But he’s
determined to carry on, to fight the good fight, to go
down swinging (and plenty of other hoary clichés
he’d never dream of using). Instead, he refers to
hoary old Matthew Arnold—persisting “not in hope
of prevailing, but to keep alive a needed attitude.”
the years here and there in English. Whether or not
that new anthology is finally true to Kharms I cannot
say, not reading my father’s Russian; but the primary
virtue of Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space is successfully introducing American readers to one of the
great radical writers of modern letters.
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear
in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists,
Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary
of Musicians, Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century
Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors,
The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com, and the Encyclopedia
Britannica, among other distinguished directories.
Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was
born, unemployed and thus overworked.
James A. Lee
If this indeed proves a Lost Cause, it’s surely a
more noble (and less bloodstained) one than that of
the neo-Confederate hate groups the likes of Morris
Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center track
with such dogged resolve.
But I go off on a tangent, as is my wont.
There’s a fair amount of wit here, too—sometimes scathing, occasionally mocking but also the
odd, healthfully self-depreciating aside. Examples:
the tale of how West’s admiration for another’s book
coupled with his fertile imagination conspired to
bring Sheer Fiction its title and his wry descriptions
of himself as, among other things, an “egghead geezer.” These welcome touches leaven the allusion-rich
and, yes, sometimes quite challenging (should I say
demanding?) text.
West refused to talk down to readers—surely
a good thing.
Not backing down one micron, he expects us to
follow his line of reasoned argument as it unfurls—to
get the implications of his allusions without excess
explanation. And I (degree-free product of the commercial genre fiction side of the literary fence that
I am) found the attendant rewards well worth the
exertion.
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I was gratified that this stalwart of literatureas-fine-art is also a champion of scientific literacy.
One hears the complaint from genre SF types that
much of the “literary establishment” is appallingly
ignorant in this area—and often displays a perverse
and self-satisfied pride in this lack.
But not Paul West!
He recognizes the broader universe. He claims
the right to interact with it. To seek to know and
understand, explore whatever place he can find in it
for himself—and for humankind as a whole. And of
course, to make use of this knowledge in broadening,
enriching and deepening his work.
One tiny example (of countless suffusing these
books, sown like broadcast grain upon a fecund
rhetorical landscape yet so intrinsic to the author’s
worldview that it’s part of each work’s DNA) comes
from an essay called “The Shapelessness of Things to
Come.” This is a writer at home making reference to
the likes of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, as one
might expect. But in the same essay (the following
page), West shares a revealing little anecdote about
physicist Hans Bethe—and makes a connection
between the models of the world that both scientist
and artist operate in.
This is, I think, no small matter.
And if West slaps the knuckles of SF writers
for timidity of even crudity of style, it’s a point well
taken and cogently argued.
This brought to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s crack
about “wiring-diagram fiction.” Le Guin’s 1979
book The Language of the Night reveals a kindred
spirit to West—coming from a different place (one
frankly more in line with my point-of-origin), but
not far apart in outlook—and less still in creative
aspiration.
Likewise, West’s critical work evinces a fascination with history (both literary and in the overall
sense) and a willingness to explore all aspects of
human experience—not merely the polite or tidy
or limited perspectives less courageous souls find
comfortable.
Another related and recurrent theme is the importance of vivid and powerful emotion, informed
by the imagination and the workings of the mind.
An exemplary example is his essay “In Defense of
Purple Prose.” This piece is part and parcel with
West’s ongoing crusade against minimalist writing.
He rails against “the righteous cult of the vacant”
whose “Disgust, allied with some anti-pleasure
principle, rules the roost and fixes taste.”
But in West’s view, “so long as originality and
lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a
right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena
and come up with as personal a version as can be.
A writer who can’t do purple is missing a trick. A
writer who does purple all the time ought to have
more tricks.” So it’s no “either/or thing anyway.
Human beings need pageantry every bit as much as
they need austerity.” And the writer “who is afraid
of mind…is a lion afraid of meat.” This defense of
the artist’s freedom to explore the most vibrant and,
yes, when it’s called for, the darkest sides of human
experience is impressive.
That West is an adept phrasemaker doesn’t
hurt either.
Again and again, West displays an overarching
passion for words coupled with imagination and ideas
and a thorough contempt for those who trumpet the
alleged joys of “lean” prose—when the more appropriate word would be anorexic.
At the root of it all rests the author’s conviction
that the heart of the novel is an organ built of personal
style (again, echoes of Le Guin).
Many essays provide insights regarding the
creative process, such as “Back to My Desk,” “Shoptalk,” and “Where Novels Come From.”
Others deal with less obvious aspects of the
writing life.
“Judge Not” recounts (with flesh-crawling discomfort) West’s brush with the politics of choosing
the National Book Award, while “Literary Lions at
the Public Library” is a mostly wistful account of
being on the receiving end of honors.
West offers appreciative remembrances of dead
friends (the like of John Hawkes and Carl Sagan).
There’s a brief piece on reading his work in the “enemy terrain” of the staid “lit-critters” of academia.
And—Nirvana for the short story writer in me—a
joyous account of West’s
encounter with Argentine
grandmaster Jorge Luis
Borges.
I do not subscribe to
all-or-nothing/zero-sum
games of any sort. So I find
West’s pessimistic speculations about the novel’s
future hard to swallow.
That’s not to say that I’m
sanguine about all (or even
most) aspects of contemporary culture. But I would
respectfully remind West
of an old historical gotcha—the bit about the
respected but unnamed
intellectual going on and
on about how everything
(ethics, taste, you name it)
is going downhill and only
doom lies ahead. Then, the punch line: The Gloomy
Gus in question turns out to be Plato, or some intellectual Bright Light of the Dark Ages—or maybe
Matthew Arnold?
The great wheel of life goes round and round.
Things ebb and flow. And yes, I spew forth another
cascade of clichés—sorry.
Anyway, “A Vision of Bright Cannon-Fodder”
is a significant and beautiful change of pace—a fond
and touchingly honest piece about West’s disabled
daughter and the book he wrote about life with her.
Another offbeat essay, on the implications of
the television coverage of the first Gulf War, seems
doubly astute in light of more recent events.
West is opinionated and passionate
about the written word—a proud,
truly serious prose artist.
To this point, I’ve focused on West’s essays—in
large part because the whole idea of reviewing another writer’s reviews strikes me as kind of bizarre.
What is there for me to say, for instance, about the
value judgments West makes about assorted books—
many of which (shame, shame) I have never read?
Even concerning works and authors I am familiar
with, shall I boldly proclaim where West is “right” or
“wrong”—as if critical evaluation isn’t the inherently
subjective (through hopefully fair-minded) process
I hold it to be?
And inevitably, the matter of two writers’ relative stature rears its deceptively compelling head.
I mean, just check Paul West’s list of accomplishments and honors! Two dozen novels, a
story collective, twenty volumes of nonfiction and
a fistful of awards. In France, they named the guy a
“Chevalier of Arts and Letters,” for Pete’s (or maybe
Pierre’s) sake!
Can you say “a daunting prospect,” boys and
girls?
Yeah, right.
But you know what?
I have this pet theory: Any writer worth the
name harbors within a certain inner arrogance. And
it’s not a bad thing. The very idea, the sheer nerve to
imagine you have something worthwhile to contribute to this vast eon-spanning conversation, this grand
yet often grubby business variously called writing,
artistic expression or just plain creativity—what more
basic a prerequisite to presenting yourself in such
terms can there be?
And so, I give it my best shot.
But first, a bit of housekeeping that falls outside
of West’s control.
Overall, these four volumes are well produced.
But a number of annoying
typos creep in. The most
egregious concerns Marie-Claire Blais’s novel
Deaf in the City (1979),
which the review’s title
mangles to DEAD in the
City.
Where, alas, have
all the copyeditors gone?
But to the reviews
themselves…
It’s really beside the
point whether I agree
or disagree with West’s
points about any given
book. The relevant issues,
I think, are how and how
well does he get his point
across.
Short answer to the
former: With much the
same free-ranging, allusive, and richly textured writing in evidence in the essays.
As for the latter: The man does pretty damn
well on that score, too.
That said (and despite my pledge not to
second-guess), I simply can’t resist a few specific
comments.
I think West is dead-on regarding One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967) and Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969), among others.
He strikes me as a bit harsh toward J. R. R.
Tolkien’s writing (but less so to those slavishly
uncritical admirers of his somewhat simplistic goodversus-evil tales).
The review of Jean Jules-Verne’s biography of
his grandfather, the pioneering French writer, was of
particular interest for a specific reason. I was reading
for this review even as I geared up to critique the
new translation of Jules Verne’s The Meteor Hunt
(1908) for another publication. That book contains
a thorough—and thoroughly disturbing—account
of the damage Verne’s son Michel did by secretly
revising this and other posthumous works then passing them off as his workaholic father’s own work.
This came to light sometime after the grandson’s
book—so West had no way of knowing that, as the
new editor’s translators/editors note, some of Jean’s
otherwise worthwhile book continued a sort of “literary fraud” by insisting that Michel merely edited
granddad’s work.
Then, there’s the matter of Anne Rice’s novel
Lasher (1993).
Alas, this is one of Rice’s titles I’ve yet to
read. But I take some exception to West’s sweeping
comment that Rice is “more a writer of science- or
speculative fiction than she is purveyor of gothic or
whimsy.” His description of this particular book is
congruent with such a judgment—and Rice famously
sought to take her career in new directions, having
tired of the be-fanged series that defined her early
career.
As for whimsy, West is again dead on—Anne
Rice would be the last person I’d seek out in hopes
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May–June 2008
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of that!
But Rice as SF writer?
Sorry, no—works like Interview with the Vampire (1976) (and the sequels she eventually burnedout on) strike me as profoundly influenced by the
gothic tradition.
It brings to mind the notion, advanced by
some who should know better, that Ray Bradbury is
a science fiction writer—despite the fact that, even
when Bradbury adopts standard SF tropes, as in The
Martian Chronicles (1950)—his overall sensibility
remains that of an author of dark fantasy.
In these four books, West frequently chews
over the thorny matter of what a novel is or should
be. He rejects pat formula, to his credit. But his taste,
his esthetic values and prejudices are his own—as
are mine. It is inevitable (dare I say desirable?) that
such diversity plays a role in the creative (and critical) processes.
In any event, one measure of writing about
other people’s writing might be whether it kindles
a reader’s desire to seek notable material he/she
might otherwise have passed by unknowingly. On
that level, these volumes are a flat-out success. And
Alan, Allen, and Shane
Dark Music
Gordon Ball
Cityful Press
1039 Lilac St.
Longmont, CO 80501
79 pages; paper, $12.00
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
—Allen Ginsberg, “Love”
When the fire had somewhat begun to weary,
Gordon Ball insinuated himself into the still dense
smoke of the Beat Generation, particularly into a
close friendship with Allen Ginsberg. Subsequently,
he has become one of that era’s finest chroniclers,
having edited the Pulitzer-nominated Allen Verbatim:
Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (1974),
and writing and lecturing on the literature and the
scene since then. Born in Ginsberg’s own Paterson,
New Jersey, Ball spent his childhood in Tokyo, but
eventually made his way back to the avant-garde of
the 60s Manhattan. There he pursued a life in film
and photography, and met up with Ginsberg, among
others, with whom he began to work on numerous
literary and art projects.
It was the right time, and the right place; Ball
found himself part of a memorable scene, an historic
era. Some of this was captured in his ’66 Frames
(1999), a memoir of his arrival on the magical and
sometimes disturbing scene.
Dark Music is a surreal blend of memories and
dreams, moments out of time—prose poems which
are at once personal and historical, as well as something more. They evoke a time and place, youth and
its longings, friendships and bonds and hardships and
losses. In his own measured words, as well as with
snippets from others, he takes account of the time
gone, setting it in order, allowing himself a more
balanced load for the road ahead.
Knowing of his background in the visual
arts, we should not be surprised by the striking,
vivid imagery of his clipped memories and curious
dreams. The short snaps—I’m tempted to call them
frames—work like a film montage, pulling from
one another’s energy, or color, or whatever it is that
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American Book Review
holds the multiple impressions together. Ball’s crisp,
exacting voice is direct, concise, and precise, poetic
without apology, as utilitarian as need be.
In a note to the reader that prefaces these poems
in prose, Ball talks about “a sudden change” in his
daily ways. Time on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, an intoxication from the songs of the young Elvis Presley,
flashbacks to his own youth in Parkersburg, West
Virginia, and Tokyo, as well as “mythic dimensions
of family history” in China, the early influences of
James Joyce, and the haunting presence over many
years of Allen Ginsberg; from this came a flood of
memories, real and imagined, knots of time recollected with affection, touched by affectation and
embellishment.
Dark Music is an orderly clash of films, fictions,
newsreels, heroes and villains, friends, family, and
loves—and Elvis.
“I was going down Cherry Street past the
Carolina Theater in February 1956, and saw
Elvis Presley heading for the side door,” my
sister tells me. “But he was too pretty looking.”
“How so?”
“His face was soft, unmannish.”
Dark Music is a surreal blend of
memories and dreams, moments out
of time.
The moments seem to have come unstuck
and fly loose, like the wild whirling in the sky over
Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz (1939), “my first
movie, age four.” The most unexpected things pass
by: Don Larsen contemplates a perfect day, while his
wife busies herself filing for divorce; Gabriel Conroy
watches new snow blanket old Ireland and considers
the dead; Bob and Ray present the Slow Talkers of
America Society; and Elvis—“Elvis likes to watch
girls in white underwear wrestle.”
At a wedding celebration,
Beth Midrash Sh’or Yoshuv—young Jewish fellow my height, granny glasses, blue
eyes, Russian hat with earflaps up, comes
my way—trying to look hip, I think before
jolt of recognition. No mad-eyed wildness
I’d imagined from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and so much else….
So, Bob Dylan moves across the sky, like one more
befuddled cow.
It is in films that Ball, the youngster, and older,
finds the key to decoding the images bounding around
him. At age four, he saw The Wizard of Oz, and reports that “the green profile of the Wicked Witch of
the West terrifies.” City Lights (1931) brings him to
so my always-growing list of books-to-read swells
considerable—among the new additions a number
of intriguing titles (fiction and nonfiction alike) by
this “egghead geezer,” Paul West.
James A. Lee’s recent publications include an essay
in the Home Planet News and a review of the recent
Jules Verne reissue in the Winter 2008 issue of Bibliophilos. He lives, writes, and reviews in Windber,
Pennsylvania.
Louis McKee
Detail from cover
tears, when he is turned out of the theater’s warm
darkness and set back into the world of interstates
and “mercury vapor…interlocking power lines,
shopping malls, trucking stations, carlights, and
roar….” It is after seeing Limelight, however, when
he realizes that Charlie Chaplin has “seen how his
life was represented by others, every event & vagary,
and enacted the rest of his career, his own death his
own terms.”
Then, at ten, there was Shane (1953):
I sing “The Call of the Faraway Hills”
from Shane riding in backseat through
Tokyo traffic; in class I sign my papers
“Shane.” I’ll write Alan Ladd to visit our
home. Physically slight, he stands up to
the greedy, the overbearing; wickedness
vanquished, his words and deeds inspire
the young boy who looks up at him. Four
decades later I realize Allen [Ginsberg]
is Shane.
Allen Ginsberg is the gentle ghost that moves
through these pages, dropping bits of wit and insight.
A graceful, loving, sincere Allen:
—Allen showing kindness and comfort to
Erich Segal, taking his hand, when, during a formal
dinner, speaker after speaker attacked the author of
Love Story (1970).
—Allen, at a luncheon in Houston, hoping
to ask John Ehrlichman, special assistant to the
President and eventually convicted felon, to intercede
for him and ask for a date with Nixon, but feels he
can’t—much to the bemusement of his heckling
father, Louis.
—Allen, while visiting friends in Jackson,
Mississippi, composing an “ardent” page-long letter
to Eudora Welty, after picking up and reading someone’s copy of The Golden Apples (1949), celebrating
her “wild sentences,” and then hand-delivering it to
her Belhaven mailbox.
—Allen, speaking of the peace movement: “I
think the movement—its anger—made it (the war)
last four more years. As Jerry Rubin boasted, ‘I got
Nixon elected.’”
—Allen, a week before he dies, pulling together
an outrageous soup for some visitors, “terrible variety
and volume: stock he made from boiled fish heads;
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McKee continued from previous page
vegetables; cream; potatoes; fishmeat; bodies; shellfish in their shells.”
Two years before his death I dream I’m
with Allen in area I think “forbidden”—
worst Bronx, where in street at night a
great young crowd or gangs surround
him—friends or foes? They do a sort
of dance, spinning around, streaming
cloth—he dances with them, gradually
eases himself onto curb, continues down
the block.
But this is not a book about Ginsberg; he is but
one of the flashing moments of reality that pop up
in Ball’s swelling recollections and dreams. Parents
make a mark, and they pass; friends move in and out,
and the barely-controlled fire of the world around
him continues to burn.
And of course, though all of this, and before
all of this, there is Elvis: “mascara’d sideburns,
strumming my father’s Chinese mandolin, I perform
‘Jailhouse Rock’ eighth grade dance. I hear ‘Love
Me Tender,’ at its beginning lips and throat are one.”
“Summer 1953, waiting to record ‘My Happines’
In the Wake of Katrina
The Unnatural History of
Cypress Parish
Elise Blackwell
Unbridled Books
http://www.unbridledbooks.com
240 pages; cloth, $23.95
Elise Blackwell’s second novel after Hunger
(2004) is, like its predecessor, historical in focus, a
tale told by Louis Proby, an old man from Louisiana
who looks back over the course of his life in order
to understand the decisions he made as a young
man, at a moment of social turmoil. Set against the
backdrop of the great flood of 1927, which resulted
in the destruction of a number of communities along
the Mississippi River, Louis introduces the significant
figures in his childhood, in particular his father, a man
who rose in class to become town superintendent for
the lumber barons of the South, and whose (reluctant)
deal making colored his son’s sense of how to get
ahead socially.
The novel starts slowly, alternating between
Louis’s description of his life as the son of Cypress
Parish’s only law man (who was of necessity first and
foremost a Company man) and the natural observations he recorded as a youth in his journal, modeled
after works by Pliny the Elder and Charles Darwin.
This journal functioned for the young man to insulate
him from the corrupt and confusing social world, and
seems to be at once a source of pride and a vexation
for the older Louis. The sensibility of an old man is
captured by the older Louis’s elegiac tone, but what
surprises is the old man’s quiet bitterness toward his
younger self, on evidence when he states:
[T]he entry [on the armadillo] mentioned
the animal’s peculiar shell only in passing and failed to suggest its function—
protection—at all. I missed the point.
Perhaps the whole project had missed the
point. The flood would hide the natural
world only by water. Over months, that
water would be sucked into the earth or
spill back into the river that had carried
it or roll over the plane of sunken earth
to add harmlessly to the volume of the
Gulf of Mexico. Some of the species of
tree and amphibian and moss and bayou
snake that I labored to describe are today
endangered. But even today, no plant or
animal named in my notebooks belongs
only to the past.
It is the other world, with its precise and
and ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,’ asked
what he sounds like, Elvis says ‘I don’t sound like
nobody.’”
Gordon Ball “don’t sound like nobody,” either.
Which is a damn good reason to check out his
Dark Music.
Louis McKee’s most recent book of poetry is Near
Occasions of Sin (Cynic, 2006). Adastra will be publishing a selection of his translations from Old Irish
of medieval monastic poems early this year.
Annette Gilson
unrepeatable configuration
of human relationships and
man-made things, that I
pain myself to remember
because I failed to record it,
even to myself, as significant. It is the human world
that was proved ephemeral
by the shimmering sea that
had been land.
This passage, with its
somewhat labored precision, fits
the persona of the fussy old scientist Louis has become, after the
events that the novel depicts have
come to a close. It also gives the
reader a taste of the rough-hewn
flavor of the world Louis tries to
resurrect. But here is the novel’s
second surprise: perhaps unlike
the man he later becomes, the
young Louis was also a sensualist. The older man
remembers the younger one exploring this sensuality
when he fell love in with Nanette Lancon, and also
when he became friends with a local painter, Gaspar
Anderson, who taught him to see the natural world
with a painter’s eye.
The human past is not the only realm
that can be eclipsed by the floods
caused by nature and by
human complacency.
Yet these ties are later betrayed by Louis’s
misplaced loyalty to Charles Segrist, the lumber company’s local representative. Charles employs Louis
as his driver and has the young Louis accompany
him to the chic restaurants and nightclubs of New
Orleans. Charles also reveals to Louis the backroom
deal brokering that goes on in these venues among
the good old boys who run the state. Louis’s head is
turned, and when deals are struck that seal the fate
of the towns along the floodplain (including his own
Cypress Parish), he is mesmerized by the glittering
forms of power. But the narrative also reveals that
Louis was as tempted by the sensual delights offered
by luxurious New Orleans as much as the power
transactions. And so it is this element in himself that
he later punishes: after the events described in the
novel, Louis dedicates himself to a life of empirical
study, and only in his old age finally comes to understand what he has been mourning all his life.
Unfortunately, the novel’s conceptual elegance
is not always as well realized as it could be. At times
the complicated layering of the past becomes as
labored as the older Louis’s attempt to pin down the
world. When young Louis meets some of the New
Orleans bigwigs, Charles points to one of them,
Detail from cover
Soileau, who has lost an arm. Charles says that the
loss has not changed the man in any fundamental
way, which causes Louis to reflect:
I didn’t see how the phantom presence of a
limb that had once been used but was now
gone could fail to change a man in some
way. Soileau had, I assumed, punched
an enemy with the fist of that arm and
touched a woman with its fingertips.
I’d never really considered what the
loss of a leg had done to my grandfather,
except to his body and occupation. Perhaps now I was old enough to ask him
about the intangible changes the loss had
wrought.
Yet now, in Soileau’s presence, I trusted
Charles’s opinion more fully…Soileau
was wiry, dark-headed, quick to speak,
and sure in what he said. His handicap
was evident only in the negative, only
in his restraint in using strong gestures,
which were, due to the force of voice, all
but unnecessary.
At times, too, the narrative’s rough-hewn lyricism—such an essential part of the evocation of the
young Louis’s wonder at the sensual world—slips.
It is replaced by workman-like descriptions that signal the author’s imaginative inattention. Describing
Charles after a night of debauch, Louis says, “His
reddish hair still had its spring, bouncing when he sat
down in his chair, but his affect was flat.” Such moments kill the complex spell Blackwell casts, which
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May–June 2008
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Gilson continued from previous page
otherwise suspends us in time so magically, allowing
us to live imaginatively both in the world of 1927 and
in the world of our present, when the human past is
not the only realm that can be eclipsed by the floods
caused by nature and by human complacency.
Still, all in all, the novel manages to balance
nicely its evocation of the past while preserving the
voice of the older Louis. It is also evocative of our
own more recent past, when the Mississippi River
devastated New Orleans two years ago, and once
again, dealmakers made behind-the-scenes decisions,
at the cost of lives as well as a whole city. Blackwell
observes: “I drafted the novel before Hurricane Ka-
trina and found the parallels unsurprising but chilling.
I had to revise the novel to be read in a post-Katrina
world. This still spooks me.” The novel is an eloquent
call to all of us to consider the consequences of our
actions, even if we aren’t the dealmakers deciding
the fates of millions. Through Louis Proby, we feel
the weight of casual decisions made, which then
must be lived with. Indeed, in spite of Louis’s ability
to tell his younger self’s story, he is in the end still
mystified by the enigmas of love and loyalty and
the puzzle presented by the choices he made. Why
did he act as he did? Would his life and his identity
have been different if he had acted differently? As
Calling Cards
A Brahms Card Ballad:
Poems Selected for Hungarians
John Ridland
Dowitcher Press
http://dowitcherdesigns.com/dowitcherpress
64 pages; paper, $13.95
The best ballads give us stories of quests. The
adventurous youth sets out to find or win a treasure,
whether a person (the ideal loved one) or a valued
object, sacred or profane. The quest requires journeys through time and space, overcoming obstacles
and, most important, providing proof of the hero’s
worthiness. The title poem of John Ridland’s new
volume provides a curious modern instance; subtitled
“From, for, and to Tibor Frank,” the poem retells
the quest of the dedicatee to add to his collection
of calling cards of famous people, a card from the
composer, Johannes Brahms. As a boy, the seeker
finds a Brahms calling card in a bookstore,
But its price—400 Schillings—
Would barely buy enough
For his mother to sew a dress from
Of ruffley Austrian stuff
And so, he refrains from satisfying his quest.
With a graceful leap, the ballad takes us forty years
later to a repeat performance—the same or a similar
card would cost as much as his “monthly stipend,”
and so he looks again and again, choosing self-denial,
fails to realize his quest, but plans to continue, at appropriate intervals, visiting “secondhand bookshops
/ To check the Brahms card prices.”
As does this pleasing example of a literary
ballad, many of John Ridland’s poems show the rich
interaction of traditional forms with characteristic
modern themes and situations. The splendid and
wrenching psalmody of “Elegy for My Aunt,” the
Herrick-like lilt of the ten-line stanzas in “Life With
Unkie,” the deft control of “My First Villanelle,”
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American Book Review
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Innovation Never Sleeps
he notes at the end of his tale, “Although I have put
together everything I know, still I cannot say what
happened.”
Annette Gilson is an associate professor of English
literature and creative writing at Oakland University
in Rochester, Michigan. Her first novel, New Light,
was published last year. She reviews fiction for a
number of periodicals and trade magazines.
Thomas F. Dillingham
the clever sestina of “Explosion in the Slat Factory” (about Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2 [1912]) all testify to Ridland’s
commitment to the discipline of the poetic art. They
also show the added intensity of emotion or thought
subjected to the discipline of strict form.
In 1999, John Ridland published his English
translation of a greatly revered Hungarian poem,
John the Valiant (revised, Hesperus Press, 2004);
Sándor Petőfi’s nineteenth-century “folk epic,” a
poem alternating between fanciful adventure and
buffoonish comedy, is described as the best-known
of all Hungarian poems. Ridland’s translation was a
result of several visits to Hungary and a testament to
his fondness for the nation and its culture. In appreciative, even grateful response, his “selected poems”
translated into Hungarian was published in Budapest
in 2004. This volume included works selected from
nearly fifty years of Ridland’s career; the opening
poem, “New Zealander,” is dated 1956, and the rest
of the poems, chosen by Gyula Kodolányi, translated
by Kodolányi and five other Hungarian poets, extend
into the twenty-first century. The volume contains a
variety of poems, but leans heavily toward the elegiac
and the literary or artistic. In addition to Ridland’s
elegy for his aunt and reminiscences of life with Unkie, we find “Last Poem for My Father,” the brilliant
“The Poet Who Didn’t Smoke” (in memory of Hungarian poets Ernő Szép and Miklós Radnóti), and the
deeply affecting sequence, “The Little John Poems,”
in memory of “John Forbes Ridland, 1963–1969”;
its conclusion, “Anniversary Elegy,” will stand with
the very finest short poems about loss of a loved one.
(I think of Ben Jonson, of Thomas Hardy, of James
Wright.)
The only possible complaint about
the book is that it includes too few
of Ridland’s poems.
Along with the elegies are the low-keyed and
witty poems of commentary—the tight couplets of
“Letter to Huck Finn” (telling him that contrary to
rumor and hope, Pap is not dead, and never will
be), the self-effacing “On Translating Janos Vitez,”
a fine example of the authorial trope of modesty, or
the clever “Dear Absolute,” a missive with dismissive reply. There are also several ekphrastic poems,
including the fine evocation of Johannes Vermeer’s
“The Little Street”:
Where all is labor, labor may turn art,
And through an art like his draw up to love,
Straighten bent spines and the bruised knees
that jut
Against the beauty they are remnants of,
Before the creaking winter slams them shut.
One of the most charming poems is “Old Fashioned
Love Poem,” a counter-elegy that celebrates the joys
and possibilities of persistence in love and companionship, rejecting conventional limitations of old age,
asking “do I not begin to believe / There are means
of deceiving time?”
Dowitcher Press, newly established to publish
beautiful volumes of poetry, has produced a lovely
small volume, handsomely printed, with a magnificent panoramic photograph of Budapest (by the
author, himself) on the wrapper. The only possible
complaint about the book is that it includes too few
of Ridland’s poems, but that can be excused because
the selection feels both representative and tempting,
urging any reader to seek out the original publications
of these poems or to hope for a more inclusive collection to come—preferably sooner rather than later.
Thomas F. Dillingham is professor emeritus of
English after teaching thirty-
five years at Stephens
College and Central Methodist University. He was
book review editor of Open Places, and his reviews
of contemporary poetry have appeared there and in
Missouri Review and Pleiades.