Category Archives: books poetry lit

The Steeple-Jack

books poetry lit July 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings –
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body — or flock
mewing where

a sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray. You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry. The

whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion. Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and

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Old Chinese Women

books poetry lit July 27, 2014 Leave a comment

They are moving, these women,

as if time were a vegetable to eat slowly
for dinner—as if bicycles were mountains
that could raise them to the sky.

-Meredith Johnson, from “Old Chinese Women” in Rattle

Drench

books poetry lit July 24, 2014 Leave a comment

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,

wake to the thrum of rain – roped down by rain.

Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass

and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace

has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.

The mountains have had the sense to disappear.

It’s the Celtic temperament – wind, then torrents, then remorse.

Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.

Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,

docks in a pool of shadows all its own.

That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.

Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

– Anne Stevenson

Ready Regret

books poetry lit July 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Gorgeous poem at Rattle today –

She used the stadium. I would have
chosen the bridge. We’re not even

Division One. Our tailgate crowds
are mostly enthusiastic about beer.

Sunlight in the trees. Sunlight
in the trees. I thought these

feelings would be blonder,
quieter, like that virus

that doesn’t kill you but kills in you
what tells you to wake up.

All the good and bad souls who
size me up judge a different woman

than the one you used to know:
two-room apartment with a view of cold

as imagined by lack of snow,
nut and honey cookies from the baker

for three weeks only to entice the spring
and later year-round because we can’t wait

for anything anymore so we forget what
the sweetness was supposed to mean.

-Lisa Olstein, Rattle

Book Review: A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

books poetry lit July 18, 2014 Leave a comment

atrickofthelight

A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny

If you’re a mystery fan, hopefully you are already aware that there’s scarcely anyone who can touch Louise Penny in the art of modern mystery-writing. Jacqueline Winspear and P.D. James both write well-crafted, occasionally brilliant novels, but in her emotional astuteness, playful style, and superb plot-building, Penny is the only mystery novelist alive today who I find to be a worthy successor (at her best) to Agatha Christie. In particular, I think that Ms. Christie would have been pleased to read a writer who could not only craft chilling, dark plotlines that unflinchingly trace the lines of human evil, greed, and envy, but who also – as Christie almost invariably did – returns to a place of distinct hope at the end of each novel. Human beings are fallen creatures in Penny’s work, but they are also creatures of light, capable of forgiveness and of loving persistently in the face of a dark world. Penny always returns to characters at the end of the novel their humanity, no matter how dragged into the dirt they have necessarily been over the course of it, and for that, I love her.

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Book Review: The Selection

books poetry lit July 16, 2014 Leave a comment

selection cvr

The Selection, Kiera Cass.

America Singer lives in a futuristic America in which, after a series of World Wars, society has been restructured as a class system. There are eight castes who each perform different duties. America is a 5, the artistic case, who earn their money by performing during national holidays and for the wealthier families. Intermarriage between castes is highly frowned upon and America’s mother hopes that she will raise their status and support them financially by marrying into a caste above her. America, however, has been in love with Aspen, the son of a family friend and a caste below her, for her entire life.

The country is governed by a regency and the state announces that it’s time for The Selection, an event in which 35 girls are chosen from a lottery and one of them selected by the Crown Prince to be his bride. America reluctantly enters the drawing at the pushing of her mother, and is shocked when she is chosen. Soon, she and 34 other girls are swept into the palace to live a life of luxury while getting to know the Prince.

This is a light and immensely readable book – I read it in two sittings flat. America is an immediately engaging heroine, mostly the story is told in first person and Kiera Cass makes America spunky and blunt but with believable fragilities and small selfishnesses that make her human. Oddly, however, it’s the first half of the book that’s the strongest – America, her relationships with the various members of her family, and her relationship with Aspen are all well-developed. The romance that develops in the second half, though….there’s exactly enough good romance in this book to make one compelling relationship, not too.

Cass attempts to set up a love triangle between America, Aspen, and Prince Maxon, and several of the scenes with Aspen and Maxom, respectively, are very compelling – but wholistically Aspen and Maxon each feel like half of a fully-rounded character. Aspen is too simple to be completely interesting – the two main drives of his life appear to be to survive and to be with America if he can, and he doesn’t have the complexity to grapple with the changes in America while she lives at the palace, or the broader social and political forces in the country. While Maxon adheres too closely to that “white prince/knight in shining armor” pattern – he’s painfully nice, formal, and innocent for much of the novel. Both male leads would have been more interesting if they had more bite to them, a little more of a rough edge.

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

books poetry lit July 8, 2014 Leave a comment

Throwback time.

sea2

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

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What I’m Into Lately: Murder Mysteries, Austen Web Series, Northern White Wine

books poetry lit, this & that June 30, 2014 Leave a comment

65-third 1. Summer put me on a huge murder mystery kick for some indefinable reason, so I’ve been engulfing Agatha Christie like Turkish delight.

Third Girl. This is a twisty Christie in that you really have no idea where you stand until the last 10 pages or so of the novel – in some of her novels, especially the Marple ones, Christie gives us most of the information, but in this one nearly all of it is withheld so we’re as confused as the victim. I did figure it close to the end but simply by instinct rather than logic. Poirot is approached by a girl who is convinced that she has murdered someone – Poirot goes on the hunt and can’t find anyone who has been murdered! This is also one of the faintly disturbing ones – a girl is psychologically ruthlessly manipulated, so it left me with a feeling of unease. Nonetheless worth a read and there’s a sweet romantic note at the end.  (Side note: do you follow me on Goodreads yet?)

The Seven Dials Mystery. A very melodramatic and ultimately silly plot, but the character-writing is superb – Lady Eileen Brent, better known as “Bundle”, is the quick-witted, plucky daughter of a Lord, and when a man is murdered in her father’s house and some clues turn up months later, she goes determinedly on the hunt. She’s a delight and there’s some very endearing romance. A Superintendent Battle mystery. All told read for the dialogue and ignore the plot.

2. Emma Approved. This webseries based on Emma from the production team behind The Lizzie Bennett Diaries is not very good, but it’s finally picked up speed with the adorable latest episode which featured some flirtation between Emma and Alex Knightley.

3.montinore_borealis_12_750

Borealis Northern White wine. This 2012 Willammette Valley wine is what the wine shop recommended when I asked for a white that was slightly sweet. It’s still a little too sweet for my taste, but really grew on me over time. It seems to be a versatile wine, it starts out a little dry in the mouth then delivers sweetness; I would say offhand that it’s a wine better with food than drunk on its own, and that it goes well with Asian food. There’s something addicting about it nonetheless – it’s a perfect refreshing summer wine, I find myself reaching for it more evening after getting home. $12.99. Update: much more polished description from Drink here.

The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book

books poetry lit June 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Came across this exquisite poem on Cellpoems and had to post it. From poet Jeffrey Pethybridge – “The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book” is part of a book-length sequence entitled “Striven, The Bright Treatise,” which was written in the wake of my brother’s suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in the winter of 2007. This excerpt from “The Book of Lamps” represents a fourth of the full poem; in its entirety, the poem is composed of 128 stanzas with each quarter attaining––as in the interrelated movements of symphonic structure––its own shape and theme.

I.

Drug-tired, at a loss, above the lucid waves.

II.

Palms rested on the railing (like anyone
looking out at the Pacific sun-set).

III.

Palms pressed against the railing, the      last
solid thing held, the limit touched—
drug-tired from the chronic drag of days.

IV.

Palms open to the light-
ness in letting go: liberty, relief—
but also plummeting and irrevocable;
the waves, unsparing.

V.

Palms pressed flat up
against the wailing wall
in your gut, ulcerous,
pocked by guilt, shame—
secret pains in being.

VI.

Palms open and upturned,
good little supplicants,
what is their (secret) prayer?—
what is open to praise?

VII.

Candor?—the grace of accuracy
to say what happened? Facts
merely disclosed by the Angel
of the Police Report?

VIII.

The right note to elicit
briny-air?—or that thick beach-chill
along the skin at dusk? The nouns
to summon it.

IX.

The fall is four seconds long, the body
reaches a speed upwards of—as physics
describes the case.

X.

(The truth is I know the truth is
made through work: lucid, unsparing).

Read the rest at Cellpoems

 

The Summer I Was Sixteen

books poetry lit June 28, 2014 Leave a comment

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

danced to the low beat of “Duke of Earl”.
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.

-Geraldine Connolly, Poetry 180