In a time of loss and transition, I read instead of writing or editing. A book is so contained with its beginning, middle, and end. Covers we can close with a sense of accomplishment and of completion.
Check out #MyYearInBooks @goodreads to discover other books I read and/or shelved in 2022: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2022/20293326.
Yes, I read quickly! And yes, books are my refuge. I read instead of grieve…and I read instead of write… or do the dishes😊. I’m a proud librocubicularist: a person who reads in bed. Audio books are included in the list, as I often listen and then read the same book to catch up. . My list is sometimes annotated with quotes and includes the very occasional film. Almost all these books are in the beloved London Library, so if your book isn’t below, ask the Library to order it! Themes include reflections on the natural world, on witchcraft, and ancient mythology. And 31 books of poetry for August cap off my list!
Top recommendation: our anthology, POETS in RESPONSE to PERIL, in support of Ukraine. The war is still raging… if you don’t have your copy of this all too timely anthology, order it for $30 plus post from https://rsitoski.bigcartel.com/ with more info on https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril#:~:text=Canadian%20poets.
“Though reading is a solitary act requiring privacy and quiet, I feel bound to other readers by an invisible thread of words, a kinship without speech.” Kathleen Winter, Lost in September
The Books
Angie Abdou, This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir. In her dedication, Angie Abdou hopes the reader will receive the book like a long letter from a good friend. And it is: a sweet, endearing, sometimes heart-breakingly honest memoir. But earlier, the price of being so open was a devastating social media attack: Abdou describes the effects in this memoir of healing. We learn what it is what Abdou plans to do with her “one wild and precious life”. During the Pandemic, it’s a lovely treat to hike in the mountains vicariously with her. And oh, I loved her cottonwood!
Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety
“There was no money in poetry; it is the wasteland of literature.”
A fine romp, more like her detective fiction than her metaphysical traipsing through many lives: none of that here! A hedonic product.
John Banville, The Singularities
What a superb stylist John Banville is. I relished his latest, The Singularities, just for the elegant writing. Yes, another grand country house, but so well done. John Banville is Prospero writing this metaphysical meta-circus of a novel, a “tease of Luciferion dedication and inventiveness”. Two words to look up in one sentence, hmmm: “so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”. John Banville wears this extensive vocab. jauntily as he stravages along.
Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel
“to return to your origins, you first have to die. You are born and fill your lungs with the earth’s air, and then you are free to flee. Your entire life becomes a tale of abandonment and flight right up to the end of it, when you are finally allowed to return to where you took that first breath. To where your memories started being born.”
Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so.
“He perceived pure being in all things… And in the being of being he perceived his own.”
“so intense seemed the reality, the—what is the word?—the haecceity, of the places and objects he encountered, and so palpable his presence among them… as alive as life itself, out stravaging the freedom of the fields”
Matt Bell, Refuse to be done: how to write and rewrite a novel in three drafts
“One thing to fix in the morning”
“you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words”
-Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19
Consciousness talks to itself, confirms, denies, digresses and replies. Not to be read for plot but for language: her copious lists, a poetry reel spinning wherever the words lead, by sound as much as sense. A book in love with the physical act of reading and writing.
“blazing through the furrows of anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the intimate blackness at its core into rapid extinction.”
“there might have been a sentence, just one sentence, of such transcendent brilliance it could have blown the world away.”
“the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings.”
Jill Bialosky, The deceptions: a novel
Jill Bialosky’s new novel is deceptive indeed. Does the male-dominated world of the ancient gods confirm her sense that men have always controlled everything? “The chorus intervenes: What if women no longer desire to satisfy the privileges of what the patriarch has built? They’ve been telling and writing the same stories for centuries. What if a new story begins with gentleness, negotiation, intuition, femininity, how would the dynamic shift?”
As transference figures, the Greek gods express her own feelings: they “deploy tricks to get what they want.” “When I compare my narrator’s woes to Heracles, I am half laughing, “and yet that’s how she’s feeling as she considers the male appropriation of women’s work across history. This theme manifests in the novel’s complex twists and turns of plot. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the narrator says, “I know I’ll find the answers if I don’t give up.” “Athena, looking sternly. You must rewrite the story, she says.” “Does he not know that my mind spins and spins with nowhere sensible to land?”
Jill Bialosky writes, “I turn to poems when I want to push the limits of language and bring alive the unconscious. Prose is more fluid.” She cites Hope Mirrlee’s experimental Paris: A Poem, 1920, published before The Wasteland, 1922!
Natasha Brown, Assembly
Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Bernardine Evaristo walk into a bar… and meet Natasha Brown. Assembly is honed stiletto-sharp, not a hair out of place, however the protagonist feels in classist, racist England. “Unfair”, whine the various white men who confront her in this short, perfect novel.
Sharon Butala, This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life.
Always brave, honest and necessary writing.
Ada Calhoun, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me
Who is “Also a Poet”? Calhoun’s father, art critic (and poet Peter Schjeldahl. Her memoir twists upright out of a failed biography or two of Frank O’Hara. I knew Bill Berkson, protégé of Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, wild man. Met Edward Gorey lurking in The Gotham Book Mart!
Julia Cameron, Seeking wisdom: a spiritual path to creative connection: a six-week artist’s way program
Write a question. Write an answer.
Write yourself a letter from your god(s).
If god had no limits, I’d ask help with…
“Unfold your own myth.” Rumi
Writing from a spirit of service, her writing took off.
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG
Cumberbatch! THE POWER OF THE DOG was spectacular, a marvel. I don’t feel visually competent to grasp at one viewing all the nuances, and I seldom watch anything twice… so I was glad to hear director Jane Campion discuss the film with women choreographer and actor, and the composer. Truly wonderful how the landscape, the sound, the costumes all feed one another.
Clare Chambers, Small pleasures: a novel.
So many charming pleasures: beautiful writing, engaging characters and utterly engaging plot. A delicious read and reprieve from current events.
Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
“Marguerite Porete—a beguine from Hainaut who, in 1310, was burned for heresy in the Place de Greve, in front of Paris’s town hall—rang the death knell of the tolerance these women had enjoyed, for they were increasingly ill appreciated due to their ‘double rejection of obedience, to both Church and husband.’”
Feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage “inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-on-law, L. Frank Baum.”
Leonard Cohen; edited by Alexandra Pleshoyano, A ballet of lepers: a novel and stories
More than juvenilia, less than the poems.
Stephen Collis, A history of the theories of rain: poems
Superb “Notes on the Derangement of Time”
“Thinkers
understanding the universe
liken rain to eloquence”
“I feel the depth
in the name of things”
Diane Cook, The new wilderness: a novel
How would we adapt to wilderness? And our kids?
Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley
Nightmare Alley disturbed my dreams and my sleep with its unrelenting neo-noir inquiry into parent child love/hate, leaning toward hate in brilliant Art Deco geometries and ancient Greek nemesis. My son worked on the set up for scenes in Ontario so I had to watch…
Carrie Lee Connel, Written In Situ: poems
Poems in honour of Artists’ models in “The Rossetti Suite”.
Jaclyn Desforges, Danger flower: poems
The poems ricocheted, reverberated, resonated. “Thank you so much, Penn! That makes me so happy especially coming from you! I appreciate your kind words so much.”
Dave Eggers, The every: a novel
Ironic to post a rating on “an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle”. You can only buy THE EVERY from indie stores (in English, in hardcover). But now the paperback is available from Amazon… How to push a behemoth off a cliff. Fun, febrile, fertile and frightening, if a tad too fat a book.
Oddný Eir; translated by Philip Roughton, Land of love and ruins
I’ve been reading about the Irish monks in Iceland who were chased out by Vikings… and the Celtic women slaves the Vikings brought in! Ah, the Irish diaspora: here I am:)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger; translated by Reinhold Grimm, Lighter than air: moral poems Mouthed the words in German alongside the English translation: FUN!
“With her thimble she gropes
for the holes of the world
and keep mending and mending.”
“The Great Goddess”
Love the sound of the German rolling around my mouth: Fingerhut! So visceral and specific.
“Mit ihrem Fingerhut tastet sie
nach den Löchern der Welt
und flict und flict.”
“Die Große Göttin”
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Louise Erdrich herself reads the audiobook in a delicious rendition as funny as it is powerfully poignant. And the novel includes a bookseller called Louise! A ghost story that starts on Halloween 2019 and progresses through that annus horribilis till Halloween 2020: one long sentence of the present. Glorious!
Annie Ernaux, A Girl’s Story
“I am her ghost, I inhabit her vanished being.”
Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa
Ferrante quotes Emily Dickinson:
“Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day -“
“The writer has no name. She is pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet and produces an alphabet within an uncontainable flow.”
“What we call ‘inner life’ is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing.”
“As Eckhart in his writings absorbs the experience of the Beguines, so Dante could have reinvented Beatrice poetically by looking at the scholarly women who were commenting on the Scriptures [like] Mechthild OF Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, Margherita Porete, and Angela da Foligno, magistra theologorum. He does it naturally by bestowing on a female figure scientific, mystical knowledge… in that inleaiarsi, so to speak, entering into becoming her—he ventures to imagine, with his mystic-leaning rationalism, with his visionary realism, what is possible for women.”
Cal Flyn, Islands of abandonment: nature rebounding in the post-human landscape
Conjuring Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World in eschatological disanthropic stories where nature regenerates in sites to perilous for humans.
And so, the last dream of the year after reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of abandonment: December 31, 2022: This California desert refuge is hidden from all comers but the solitary man who lives among the ruins of a deserted town, poisoned by pesticide and salt calcification. Except that the one man who also knows the route in is now leading another guy to the place. Wheeling marks obliterate the track, but the two men keep on trekking, wearing broad brown hats to ward off the sun. The desert bird frantically wheels about, its huge wingspan stirring up dust to hide the trail, to no avail. And on the outskirts of the nearby town, outside an old age home, a group of people are dancing in a circle. When I zoom in, it’s apparent that these are the elderly in a fitness program they usually dislike. But now several white-haired women are laughing, enjoying the dance. “You are actually laughing!” one says to the other. Some of the disgruntled elders break off for freedom, intent on heading out into the desert to live the rest of their days in the abandoned ruin. What will the disgruntled hermit do now that his refuge has been discovered?
Nina George; translated by Simon Pare. The book of dreams: a novel
Fond of Sam, the young synaesthete, and his perceptions,“In Persia we call the meeting of two opposites bar-khord. Bar-khord happens when two strong elements touch and something new forms… the highest bar-khord is dying. When death and life meet in dying, they create…”
Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night
O glory worthy of the Nobel… I wrote ‘novel’! That too.
Louise Gluck, American Originality: Essays on Poetry. Essential and astonishing reading and re-reading for any poet and reader of poetry. “What remains is tone, the medium of the soul.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind
Delighting in natural histories like this, histories that are so preciarious now, to be treasured.
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time
Essential sorties into our feminist past from one who was there.
Hiromi Goto x Ann Xu, Shadow life
This graphic novel features a sassy old woman who lives as she chooses. Yes!
Jorie Graham, Runaway: new poems
Runaway is essential to me as a poet. It opens whole areas of consciousness that I haven’t seen articulated before! Especially, “WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN
stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light. Over but
not on magenta…” Truly transforming in its in/sight!
“shuddering done, no lift or fall, no, no interval, no thought, no whispering of thought,
no. Noticing blends with light. Seeing is light. No trouble in the gaze even as the
gaze gazes upon stillness and is stilled. Where is the motion I know. Where. Any
breeze and I’d be human again. Swirl of leaf and I’d see it again. The vacancy. The
crust afloat above the thing itself. There being no further than this as-if
hallucination. The hallucination of no as-if. The end. What is utterly. Is this
ancient. Is this. As if a huge pity but entirely and only made of matter. Where
has motion gone—it has taken time fate need. All lies here now in
the seen. Not seen as such just there entire in the laying-out of itself in the
which-is. No if. That’s it. The stillness of no if. Dear friend, you cannot cross here
This is the visible world, I have seen it in this my life, by accident, just now, I have
recognized it. I do not know that I will glimpse it again in this life, I assume it’s my
one life, my mind roves over it all tapping, trying words, again words. The poem
is built for this. To come to this limit & see in & fail. It is built for this particular
failure. This wakefulness that wipes out the waking. This muteness which is the
heart of what. It is not silence. Now each wick is lit as the planet moves into
the end of the visible. The spiderweb is played string by string by the sun. Waits.
Error. Nothing waits.”
Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
Well, yes. We know that.
Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche were a narwhal: what animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity
Delicious terms thrown out at random: prognostic myopia
qualia: the properties of conscious experience
episodic foresight mortality salience death wisdom
therianthrope: half human, half animal
aposematic signaling: wired to beware
Lauren Groff, Matrix: a novel
“Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.” Loved this celebration of mediaeval visionary Marie of France!
Tessa Hadley, Free Love
“It seemed such an abject fatality for women—to be split apart in agony, bringing forth the new generation. Males were sealed at least into their single stupid bodies, which ended, thank God, when they did. This was bound to make essential differences between the sexes.”
Glorious, nuanced prose. So delicious, evocative of London, 1967. I was living there then and this book transported me back, Of course the young in the book are reading R.D. Laing… we were! David Cooper, Kingsley Hall, your cat:) Our London commune’s group psychiatrist was Morty Schatzman, who wrote SOUL MURDER: Persecution in the Family, one of the gang of three at Kingsley Hall. Those were the days, my friend:)
Matt Haig, The Comfort Book
“In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging that both coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty.”
“I cannot escape death but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Epictetus
Other than a few gems, fatuous comfort.
Alexandria Hall, Field music: poems
Like elephants mulling
over the dead, music is a handling. Listen to the sounds
of a touched thing: a body, the panpipe”
“Syrinx”
Joy Harjo, Poet warrior: a memoir
In these quotes, you can experience her voice directly as written: “And the voice kept going, and Poet Warrior kept following no matter
Her restless life in the chaos of the story field.”“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from
dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of
dreaming stuff.
This is the first world, and the last.”“The imagining needs praise as does any living thing.
We are evidence of this praise.”“When you talk with the dead
You can only go as far as the edge of the bank.”
“Frog in a Dry River”
Andrew Harvey, Love is Everything, A Year With Hadewijch of Antwerp.
https://www.andrewharvey.net/products/love-is-everything/categories/2150805545/posts/215963908, a 13th century Beguine mystic
Frank Herbert; with an introduction by Brian Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
What a Buddhist take on the multiworld realities of Dune: like the past lives available to Tulkus; leaping through the Bardos. Cf. Read just after Buddhist George Saunders’s wild Liberation Day. “Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.” The Zensunni Whip.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
The protagonist Mira’s name means Look! in Spanish, and Pure Colour is perception incarnate, phrase by beautiful phrase. This so deserved its GG! One of my very FAVES.
Charlotte Higgins, Greek Myths: A New Retelling
You know: Euterpe, lyric verse. Erato, love songs. Calliope, epic verse. And the Winds Boreas north, Zephyr west, Eurus east and Notus south. She expounds upon Euripides’ Helen in Egypt while her replica made of clouds is in Troy. Wish we had 6th C. poet Stesichorus’s version.
“In the old myths, weaving was women’s speech, women’s language, women’s story”. Carolyn Heilbrun, “What Was Penelope Unweaving?”
“Earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to… related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave.” Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe.
“Tiresias had a daughter called Manto; her powers of prophecy, which she honed much later at Delphi,…so beautiful that poets would write them down and pass them off as their own.” As Homer took her verses. Mantis is Greek for prophet. Hence mantic and praying mantis. She was known as Daphne too. It turns out Pyramus and Thisbe is Babylonian. Her blood stained the white berries of mulberry red.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration… We honor their presence by naming the legacies they leave us.”
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky
More fun and more inviting than a hagiography of a little known Roman saint, with hypnotic rhythms of repetition that are almost musical.
Susan Juby, Mindful of Murder
Laughing & loving this Buddhist butler mystery:) & more to come. A novel based on Hollyhock, Cortes Island BC. And a series to follow! I want to BE Helen: more scrutable than Jeeves:): a sequel to Helen: yes!
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. Epigraph in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead
Amitava Kumar, A time outside this time
Oddly titled, as this novel is so much of its time, ours, just passed. More of an extended essay than a novel, but relevant; it holds the reader’s interest in its examination of fake news. In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith “remembers the past, which has been obliterated. A time outside this time. Is that why readers went looking for 1984 after Trump was elected? Literature as an expression of a tiny will to freedom.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Killing of the Sacred Deer
October 31, 2022: How fitting a dream for this autumn quarter day!
For several days now, Gavin and I have eaten at a Greek restaurant downtown. This morning, he drops me off outside the place so I can order the meal while he returns home in our blue VW to collect whatever he forgot. Looking into the restaurant, we notice that the sun fills the open back door with intense rays all the way east through the entire town. How remarkable! But, I learn, the restaurant doesn’t open for meals until 5:30.
When I enter, the mustachioed beefy owner greets me more quizzically than warmly. Sitting down, I understand why. Sex videos to a full house, this early in the day! On stage, a man and woman are kissing enthusiastically and expertly, the image enlarged behind them on screen. Though at first I think it’s a video, the couple bow to their enthusiastic audience after the exhibition.
The owner’s young daughter comes down the rows with her little sister to present me with the Halloween gift of seventy-five cents in change, as a thank-you; I don’t know for what, but we smile lovingly at one another.
My gift to the owner is the knowledge that his place is in direct alignment to the rising sun at the Equinox. For sure, it’s the morning sun in the autumn. Though he’s not unduly impressed, he asks me to write a concise note that he can use as a plaque to attract tourists. A difficult process, to condense and clarify my description: no metaphors!
The daughter is from Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer. She presented an essay on Iphigenia to her class! Cf. Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis. Her plea to be the one sacrificed and her mother’s suggestion that they could always have more children reminded me of the grisly pleas of Ugolini’s children starving in Dante’s Inferno: eat us, father, for you have given us life and can take it away.
Clarice Lispector, An apprenticeship, or, The book of pleasures; translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler; afterword by Sheila Heti; edited by Benjamin Moser
“arithmetic came form ‘arithmos’ which means rhythm, that number came from ‘nomos’ which means ‘law’ or ‘norm’”
“the great freedom of not having ways or forms”
“in this dream-glimmer state that she dreamt seeing that the fruit of the world was hers… hanging in the dark space”
D.A. Lockhart. Go down Odawa way.
Kegedonce Press
“Shemu Sipu”
for Deshkan Ziibi
“the first gift of creation
is the turtle shell we tread upon.
Water the certain cut of motion
on this land, the divine that leads
us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Wonderful onomatopoeia in the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect (ul)
Nishnabemowin (Nish)
asukwkana songs (ul)
awenik people (ul)
awentetak little people(ul)
chikenemwi turkey (ul)
chiskukus (ul) robin
chulensak birds (ul)
gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish)
kwikwinem duck (ul)
maxkalaniat red-tailed hawk (ul)
neneskakw red bud tree(ul)
winkimakwsko sweet grass (ul)
nushemakw willow (ul)
waawaashkeshi white-tailed deer(ul)
Waawiiyaatanong
I loved puzzling out the Lenape Southern Unami Dialect words for creatures of this land, often onomatopeic: chulensak birds (ul)
gaagaaglishib cormorant (nish)
I thought you’d like his poem for our “Thames”, the Antler River, the Askinassippi:
“Shemu Sipu”
for Deshkan Ziibi
“the first gift of creation
is the turtle shell we tread upon.
Water the certain cut of motion
on this land, the divine that leads
us ashore, to places life finds us.”
Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
“It is as though the act of concentration itself draws out something latent, or, if time becomes a dimension like width, something that was there all along.”
“geography was making its way back into history”
“the land’s guiding specificity”
“When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences,”
“remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening—resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand… Indigenous people observe. They pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects.” “a verb, the gerund ‘bearing.’”
“to prefer to live a metaphorical life—that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings”
“If I simply accept my limitations and push on with the research, I frequently find that the disparate pieces self-sort and come together on their own, merging like iron filings”
“I gravitate toward environments of uncertainty like this—the intersection of cultural and physical geography”
“I continued to rely to believe, too, in the immanence of the Blessed Mother… a female bodhisattva… the Black Madonna”
Jeanette Lynes, The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel
For sweet literary Romance, I’m enjoying The Apothecary’s Garden: A Novel by the fire. Something between Jane Urquhart and Helen Humphreys: not my usual cuppa, but perfect comfort fare. Glad to have outside complete, whew, and to be cozy. A fine literary Romance devoted and dedicated to Common Magic!
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne
“Hermione looks around the unfriendly room, she glimpses a girl with eyes like “star sapphires”—the hypnotic Fayne Rabb. With our heroine’s identity split into shards by her academic failure, her lover George back from Europe, and Fayne’s eyes “slanting rain blue” in her direction, the stage is set for a debate between heterosexuality and mystical erotic sisterhood.” From H.D., HERmione: Frances Gregg and Ezra Pound https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/hds-art-of-failure?
Fain: willingly under the circumstances. Lord Randall.
Alexander MacLeod, Animal Person
On a glorious afternoon, strolled down to Gibbons Park in London, read Animal Person, story to story from park bench to park bench all the way home:)! Didn’t arrive back till 6 pm. Sweet! Came across clusters of Concord grapes, so am making juice. I love how MacLeod takes the specifics of a story and reaches an abstract in the last sentence.
Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk: Stories
Hilary Mantel describes Learning to Talk: Stories as “autoscopic. From a distant, elevated perspective, my writing self is looking down at a boy reduced to a shell, waiting to be fleshed out by phrases. Its outlines approximate mine, but there is a penumbra for negotiation.”
“words are not enough; my early world was synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.”“But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.
There is a poem by WH Auden, called ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard The desert sighs in the bed
And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead
The purpose of my first lecture is to ask if this lane is two-way street. In imagination, we chase the dead, shouting, ‘Come back!’ We may suspect that the voices we hear are an echo of our own, and the movement we see is our own shadow. But we sense the dead have a vital force still – they have something to tell us, something we need to understand. Using fiction and drama, we try to gain that understanding. In these talks, I hope to show there are techniques we can use. I don’t claim we can hear the past or see it. But I say we can listen and look.” https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/what-wisdom-do-the-dead-offer-us-the-reith-lectures-by-hilary-mantel-
“When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
“Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed & prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon?” Hilary Mantel
Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future 2022
Not to read alone in bed at night. Truly scary and scarily too true.
Anna Maxymiw, Minique
A girl with synesthesia in !7th C. Montréal: to be read alongside Danielle Daniel’s Daughters of the Deer, Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial and Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. AND Kathleen Winter’s marvellous Lost in September. Innkeeper/herbalist Anne Lamarque and her grimoire also feature in the new Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities where she was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal! Coincidence? A plethora of witches this year!
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book
The Hero of This Book for me was not Elizabeth McCracken’s ostensible hero, her mother, but McCracken’s lucid, pellucid style, especially her notes on writing. Her play between genres presents us with oxymorons: the novel reads like the memoir she denies it is.
“Why are you writing about me?
Because otherwise you’d evanesce, and that I cannot bear.”
Judith McCormack, The Singing Forest
“They should have known something, of course. They did know. They didn’t know.” Why haven’t we all been reading Judith McCormack’s all too relevant The Singing Forest from Biblioasis? Blurbs by Kim Echlin, Shaena Lambert & Caroline Adderson Caroline Adderson enticed me. Her prose held me throughout even the most terrible events.
Ian McEwan, Lessons
Lessons ranges throughout the trajectory of a century and the lives of Roland and Alissa, who becomes a novelist at great cost. What counts, writing or family? She, determined and ruthless; he drifting and passive. The committed writer leaves motherhood behind: genius and/or monster. The granddaughter, Stephanie, is Evangeline.
“The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.”
Reading two elder male writers, both superb stylists: life review novels by Russell Banks, Foregone: a novel, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons. But the wife in each book, though ostensibly essential, is a cipher with few lines and fewer lineaments to her character, despite her work being portrayed by the husband as better than his. Taking male privilege for granted: a generational assumption to be outmoded? I hope so.
Stephen Mitchell, Joseph and the way of forgiveness: a biblical tale retold
Loved this by Byron Katie’s husband.
“How do you honestly and deeply ‘interpret’ a dream? By dreaming onward.” Thomas Moore
Melody Moezzi, The Rumi prescription: how an ancient mystic poet changed my modern manic life
“Through the song of the nightingale you may learn to compose,
You still can’t know what it sings to the rose.”
“You’re like a pearl asking where the ocean lies,
All the while soaking in its tides.”
“Listen to how the reed flute sings its song,
Lamenting a separation gone on too long.”
Rumi, Masnavi Molana: our master
Another interesting twist on memoir, incorporating all she learns from her father and Rumi: Molana: our master.
Sy Montgomery, The Hummingbirds’ Gift
Raising abandoned chicks and releasing them into the wild!
Sy Montgomery, The hawk’s way: encounters with fierce beauty
Ah to find one’s inner hawk: that ferocious focus!
Sy Montgomery, The soul of an octopus: a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness
Listening to Sy Montgomery read, her enthusiasm is contagious.
Lisa Moore, THIS IS HOW WE LOVE
Difficult to read only because the characters are so well-drawn and the writing so superb, yet their situation is harrowing and poignant Moore never holds back. The characters have their own voices: the painter’s is painterly! And oh that Newfoundland weather: a song against so many storms, literal and emotional. A perfect House of Anansi book.
Virginia Morell, Animal Wise
Also depicts animal consciousness: so many interesting new studies in animal perception!
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
“Mukherjee employs the literary equivalent of a massive zoom lens, both tracing the history of physicians and scientists who parsed living beings into ever-smaller constituents … and then zooming out to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of ourselves that this knowledge required.” Vincent Lam
Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: the Subversive Power of Literature in Trouble Times
“the root of word in Arabic comes from another word: wound.”
Kristen Nef, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive.
My Inner Critic transforms to Inner Compassion when ‘they’ are awarded a gold star for good work through the decades and promoted to Inner Compassion😊 What a relief into more spaciousness, fuller breath!
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
How apt and appropriate to read Maggie Nelson’s lucid On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint these days when the definition of Freedom has escaped all known boundaries.
Claire North, Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1)
An opinionated re-telling of The Penelopiad from Hera’s encompassing perspective: “Listen to my voice: I who have been stripped of honour, of power and of that fire that should be mine, I who have nothing to lose that the poets have not already taken from me, only I will tell you the truth. I, who part the veil of time, will tell those stories that only the women tell. So follow me to the western isles, to the halls of Odysseus, and listen.” I couldn’t resist such an invitation and Claire North followed through.
Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: overcoming in uncertain times
December 9, 2022: Flying home from Washington, I take the direct route to Vancouver over to Toronto and then London, rather than stopping over in Chicago. This way I beat the others and am able to retrieve my things from the locker before they arrive to check.
While listening to Michelle Obama read her new book.
Alix Ohlin, We Want What We Want
“The Brooks Brothers Guru” Stories lifted out of cliché into glitter, fabulous fun
Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities
#18 is the most rewarding in the series, as Penny was a CBC journalist reporting the 1989 murder of 14 women in Montréal killed because they were women. In Minique, Anna Maxymiw develops even further the historical herbalist/innkeeper, Anne Lamarque, who was tried for witchcraft in 17th C. Montréal.
Tom Prime, Mouthfuls of space
“I was a small town— almost happy”: poems of dissociation and surreal dislocations.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill
“Orpheus will go to the cliff
And call the dead to come
To us from the sea where
They have been swimming. ”
Molly Peacock, Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door.
A lovely study of painters and painting. Tonalists “connected light both to emotions—and to the sounds of emotions. Using musical vocabulary, like nocturne or symphony, they suggested that emotions could be heard through paint”.
“tap into childhood to find the ‘transitional object;” as D.W. Winnicott calls it: “‘Our first adventures into reality are through the objects” with “vitality or reality of its own.”
E. Alex Pierce, To float, to drown, to close up, to open
How I hear Daphne Marlatt’s rhythms, her influence, especially in the first poem:
“where the great artery rises and crosses, coming so close
to the larynx, the lynx in larynx, the animal voice
in his first low growl”
The first section opens whole areas of consciousness that I haven’t seen articulated before: truly transforming in its in/sight! It turns out we’re close in age as well: I was born in 1944: war babies. “And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound
and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. See sees
the fire—space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame”
Yes, to context, though context for me is the nest for the fledgline (I meant fledgling!) and in prose. The gift wrapping round the jewel, nugget, pearl of the poem. Daphne Marlatt’s long rhythms underscore the first pages. Imagine reading this book (again) along with Jorie Graham, Runaway: new poems! Especially, “WHEREAS AS I HAD NOT YET IN THIS LIFE SEEN”
stillness. Stillness in time. Rich concentrate. Late summer late-day light.”
Seeing into the space of light. of sound…!
I so identified with Pierce’s piano pieces: I got to Gr. 9 and gave up… I could never keep time but was ‘expressive”:) much to the nuns’ chagrin… Those Preludes, though! That war haunts us war babies, conceived in such chaotic times and imprinted as a lurking shadow. E. Alex Pierce’s Vox humana awaits me soon.
Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory
Dr. Mark Collins: “When patients have vestibular dysfunction, the same parts of the brain that control emotional functioning get affected… an autonomic reaction where their heart rate increases and they develop anxiety” circular feedback, f;lux.
Clare Pollard, Delphi
What I’d like to remember:
“Stichomancy: Prophecy by Lines Chosen at Random”
“In the second century AD, Artemidorus, a Greek physician who lived in Rome, wrote that there were two classes of dreams: the somnium, which forecast events, and the insomnium, which are concerned with present matters. His Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams) is a dream dictionary.“
The Sibylline Books, oracular prophecies “bought from the Sibyl at Cumae by the last king of Rome, Tarquin”
John Dee “advocated for the founding of English colonies in the New World to form a ‘British Empire,’ a term he coined.”
“a triad of sisters called the Thriae, with heads like aged women’s, besprinkled as if with white pollen, and the lower bodies and wings of bees… buzzing with gossip, nectar-eaters, swarming, the potential to sting. They were nymphs of the springs of the Corycian Cave of Mount Parnassus. Pan’s cave” at Delphi
“the tragic hero has a moment of anagnorisis. A change from ignorance to awareness.”
Accelerationists “want the digital and the human to merge. They call that the Singularity”
Patternists. Human “patterns will be transferred into robots”
Barbarian, from the Greek barbaroi: babbler, an onomatopoeic word for foreigners whose words sound like” burbling.
Justin Phillip Reed, The malevolent volume
“I am the kind of cautionary poem
that no one anymore has the peacetime
to memorize. In my marrow screams a horse-
drawn savage. I was loved, to make matters worse.”
“The Whiteness of Achilles”
“We are the dead. We set the tone death.
We climb their sleep like bellflower horns, and blow.”
“If We Must Be the Dead”
“I sleep
in the wilderness of my losses.”
“The idyll was a metropole of violence. Verses from
the vantagepoint of frost were purely blank, not free.”
“the lazy laryngeal runnel”
Astonished by Justin Phillip Reed’s The malevolent volume: the beauty in horror, dismembered by memory.
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
Well, a mixed bag because of so much necessary but heavy-handed messaging, even though I agreed with the author. Ideas in action don’t necessarily make for a compelling read. I did learn more about economics and trading than I thought I wanted to. Quibble: the kids easily read the epitaph on a tombstone near Melville’s grave, but only learn to read some hundreds of pages further on.
“an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.”
“We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communication. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Stuart Ross, You exist, details follow: poems
“Love me. Tender my loins.
Through all this, a life
wandered.”
Yusuf Saadi, Pluviophile
You don’t have to love rain to enjoy “The Place Words Go To Die”: “Primifluous was there and wandered murk-eyed /in the river’s bones” … flowing first, doncha know. Saadi lives inside words, as in:
“Strange how we retain pieces of
language, the way Yeats holds terrible
for me, as in terrible beauty, or Rumi
beloved for you, as in beloved let me enter.””
And in “Is the Afterlife Lonely Too?”:
“…do the dead hide inside
poems, in the corridor between stanzas, curling fetal
In a b’s womb? (Are you here, now?) When the dead speak
do words signify perfectly with presence?”
George Saunders, LIBERATION DAY
What a Buddhist he is in his writing! Read just before the similarly Buddhist Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune. What a Buddhist take on multiworld realities: like the past lives available to Tulkus; leaping through the Bardos.
Samanta Schweblin, in Seven Empty Houses
“I fished for the paper in my pocket, put it in my mouth, and as I swallowed it I repeated his name in silence, several times, so I would never forget it.” “An Unlucky Man”
Elif Shafak, The island of missing trees
Features a wise old fig: “For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its silver-white bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins.”
Shyam Selvadurai, Mansions of the Moon
Dreaming August 28, 2022: Waiting to figure out what to do next, we hang out in a friend’s flat. Anne’s delicately crocheted wool scarf is wrapped around my neck as protection. We should head from Bloor St. down to the lake, walking the long blocks, passing her house. Before we set out, I realize I’ve left the scarf on the floor of the apartment. So I sneak back in to retrieve it, hoping not to be detected. Inside, poet Marvyne Jenoff has picked up the scarf, examining it closely. If Anne’s name on it, I will be incriminated. Though I think I’ve escaped without notice, Marvyne calls me out, specifically noting Anne’s telltale scarf.
The white scarf is a kata, which the Buddhist practitioner offers the teacher at the end of an empowerment as an emblem of surrendering the self to Reality. The scenes come from a novel I just read, Shyam Selvadurai’s Mansions of the Moon, about Buddha’s wife, Yaśodharā and son Rāhula. And the kata, from Lama Lena’s profound Dzogchen teachings, next:
Shabkar, The Flight of the Garuda: Dzogchen Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Translated by Keith Dowman.
“Ordained as a Gelug monk, the itinerant yogi Shabkar was renowned for his teachings on Dzogchen, the heart practice of the Nyingma lineage.”
August 27, 2022: At the conference centre, I have been asked to give an hour long talk on Dzogchen, though I am very much a beginner myself. The organizer, Ione, a small woman with short black hair and bangs, encourages me. What would Ione be short for? Something classical. When I arrive at the venue early, a few people, mainly men, have already gathered around the long table. I introduce myself and ask for their names, thinking I’d be able to remember the ten or so here. But as I begin speaking, more and more people arrive until even the balcony is filled: an audience of around a hundred. “Enlightenment is easy,” I remark.“The trick is to stay enlightened, not to be deterred by distractions. One of you might be enlightened right now. It can happen in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger in any moment of presence. Watch!” I snap my finger, looking directly at one of the men hanging over the balcony rail. “Maybe it’s you!” He startles. “Wake up! Enlightenment is your natural birthright. All you need is to uncover and release thought. Let it go. What is behind, below your thinking, your feeling?” I continue for an hour, the audience with me, though they have had little prior experience of meditation. They shuffled out, talking among themselves, men off the street heading back. Ione comes in to congratulate me and to clean up, asking for the donation box. I’ve forgotten to ask specifically for dana, though the box is in plain sight. When Ione asks me to speak again next week, I agree, wondering if I will be paid or if all the money goes to the centre. I know most of the audience will return. I should pass the hat to ensure they donate something, even a pittance.
Listening to Lama Lena’s eloquent, heartfelt Dzogchen progression of 22 talks on The Flight of the Garuda, as she elucidates the text and skillfully responds to questions. “What is behind the thinker, the perceiver? Search for yourself. Find your mind,” she exhorts, knowing that there is no ground but emptiness. “Follow the instructions,” she insists. I do. And she discusses the five Dhyani Buddhas!! https://www.learnreligions.com/the-five-dhyani-buddhas-4123189
The dharmata/dharmadatu of Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya. “dharmakaya is like the sun, sambhogakaya is like the rays, and nirmanakaya is like the rays hitting the objects on the earth.” The Three Bodies of Enlightenment – Lion’s Roar https://www.lionsroar.com/the-three-bodies-of-enlightenment…. “dharmadatu (chös-kyi-dbyings in Tibetan) can tentatively be translated as ‘the expanse of phenomena.’” “a Sanskrit term meaning “realm of Truth.” It is derived from the Sanskrit root words, dhatu, meaning “dimension,” “sphere’”.
Ann Shin, THE LAST EXILES: A NOVEL
Her Korean heritage and history brought vividly, poignantly alive.
Daniel Siegel, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence–A Complete Guide to the Groundbreaking Wheel of Awareness Meditation Practice: Listening to Daniel Siegel read from his book. His exploration of consciousness parallels Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind in tracing consciousness not just to the brain but to the far older nervous system. His model of the wheel, with its hub of being and the rim of thoughts and feelings is a good one.
Merilyn Simonds, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay
An homage to this stalwart, remarkable and unflinching woman from Sweden, thriving in Northern Ontario! Glad to learn about her.
Richard-Yves Sitoski, How to Be Human
This poet has found his stride!
“I am Sappho constructing an authorial persona to be revealedto Anne Carson
in poems composed as fragments to begin with.”
“Conclusions” “revealed to be the author
writing themselves into being.”
Richard-Yves Sitoski, Wait, What?
Throughout Wait, What? the poet is utterly present, witnessing with exquisite, unflinching acuity his life, from conception to now. Wait, What? articulates keen perceptions on every page with finely honed lines that are an intense delight. These poems give the reader pause (often a jolt) to ponder what it is to be human. A fearless, often funny stylist, Sitoski is a poet to watch.
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By the Sea
“It’s odd how the mind does not take anything in until it can.” So engaged in the characters’ lives, I’d read on and on!
Angela Szczepaniak, The nerves centre
A ten-act cast of characters: poetry in performance, poet performing! A study of anxiety, her titles from self-help with dramatis personae. My fave: Mime Heckler. Utterly uttered!
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel
Animal: a novel is a ferocious diatribe against male sexual violence. Since the book is dedicated to her parents and she lives with her husband and daughter, I wondered about the story behind the novel.
Jordan Tannahill, The Listeners
Ears wide open.
Brandon Taylor, Filthy animals
No, thanks.
Miriam Toews, Fight Night
Preparing for the cold last night by watching ALL MY PUNY SORROWS: such a literate, poignant and tender film based on the Toews novel! And reading , Fight Night, familiar characters: the grandmother, the girl.
Colm Tóibín, Vinegar Hill
“Orpheus will go to the cliff
And call the dead to come
To us from the sea where
They have been swimming.”
Fine work, organic and very present.
Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft, The books of Jacob: or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment
I thought of Polish friends so often reading Polish Novel Prize novelist Olga Tokarczuk. The books of Jacob is almost 1,000 pages, so I’ve written out a quote or two about messianic Jacob Frank. To him: “The Maid is God’s wisdom hidden in a painted board like a princess in a tall
On alchemy: “do not the words light (or) and infinity (Ein Sof) have the same numerical value?” And gematria. books about light: the Book of Brightness, the Gates of Light, the Light of the Eyes, “the Light of Holiness, and finally the Sefer haXohar is the Book of Splendor.” What an ending! She’s still in the cave, turning into diamond! Worth the wading.
Emily Urquhart, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me
Today, in Emily Urquhart’s The age of creativity: art, memory, my father, and me, I read: “Limitation, necessarily, inspires. Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum, whose scholarly work on death and dying redefined what we know about this stage of life, has written that creativity ‘may be the aging individual’s most profound response to the limits and uncertainties of existence.’ Facing resistance… it is human nature to invent new pathways.”
“Alterstil, or ‘old-age style,’… Some cultural critics, Kenneth Clark and Edward Said among them, claim that the same old-age-style characteristics appears…as increasingly abstract, spiritual, or ethereal, and the blurring of formal and informal styles is described as a nod to eternity.”
“old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’” Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird salamander. “A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.” This bird becomes a noir and naiad metaphor for the entire eco-novel’s lament for dying species and genocide in the Anthropocene.
Beyond the sylvan felicity of names and family background, what connects Silvina with the Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo? A nod to Borges, Ocampo’s friend and supporter?
Jeff Vandermeer, Annhilation
Sarah Venart, I am the big heart
“What I can’t lose, I’ve used.” “Chance Harbour
Paul Vermeersch; introduction by Daniel Scott Tysdal, Shared universe: new and selected poems, 1995-2020
Surrealism in colourful play and display.
Katherena Vermette, The Strangers
“He’d always talk about being a Stranger like it was a good thing, like it was the opposite of what the world seemed to think it was. ‘Never forget who you are, Margogo, and who you come from. We are warriors, us. We are Métis. We have fought and won our freedom. We’ve never lived by their rules. Aren’t meant to. We have to be free.’”
Martin Walker, The Coldest Case
What not to like… murder mystery and French country cuisine cooked by Bruno!
Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock
A haunting chronicle of women across generations against the eerie presence of the Bass Rock that silently bears witness to thewomen’s voices.
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise
Nicely structured fin de siècle tome, over three centuries, based on Washington Square and similarly named characters not to mention Hawaiian royalty. Deja vu, David Mitchell!
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”
“The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity… When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.”
Zoe Whittal, The Spectacular
Three generations of women negotiating current, changing times. It’s complicated, very. Spectacular, if you’re 21. I’d have liked much more from the oldest woman but it’s a long novel as is. Reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue.
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
October 20, 2022: The painting by Swedenborg is a swirl of oranges that resolve under closer scrutiny into several figures if you look closely enough. To the right, a person is in profile, looking on at two people of the same sex kissing. Would this have been a scandal too egregious to represent directly in the nineteenth century?
A dream while listening toGabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which depicts the image of a magic eye that reveals a hidden icon.
Anthologies
Marple: Twelve New Mysteries
So much fun! And older women are no longer ignored in these stories:)!
Magazines too numerous to mention!
And my fave 31 books of poetry for August! @SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #31Books31Days #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChallenge2022
Day 1 Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. Christine Lowther, editor. @CaitlinPress. Such an evocative, provocative essential anthology! Poets, both settler and Indigenous, pay tribute to trees through reflections on the past, connections to the present, and calls for the protection of our future.@SealeyChallenge #31BooksInAugust #TheSealeyChallenge #TheSealeyChalenge2022
Day 2 Resistance Anthology: Righteous Rage in the Age of Me Too. University of Regina Press. Sue Goyette #editor https://uofrpress.ca/Books/R/Resistance…
Day 3 Charlie Petch, Why I Was Late “To be performed with dulcimer.” “Things You Didn’t Know about Me” Self-referential, engaging fun Performative poetry like Nerve Centre but stronger.
Day 4 Voicing Suicide. Editor, Daniel C. Scott http://ekstasiseditions.com/recenthtml/voicingsuicide.htm… This collection of poems offers important explorations by writers who speak of it without bars.
Day 5 Heartwood: Poems for the Love of Trees. Editor, Lesley Strutt. https://poets.ca/publications/heartwood/. This anthology continues my theme of activism through poetry to raise awareness about our threatened environment.
Day 6 Junie Désil. Eat salt/gaze at the ocean: poems
“scudding back & forth through history” “There isn’t a pastness”/
Day 7 Missing link: On the Storm/In the Struggle. Editor, Adebe DeRango-Adem. https://poets.ca/on-the-storm-in-the-struggle-poets-on-survival/ @adebe_
Day 8 Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony
“It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.”
Day 9 Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry
“Lumen means both the cavity of an organ, literally an opening and a unit of luminous flux Literally a measurement of how lit The source is Illuminate us”.
Day 10 Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Sleep ‘til Eden.
A poet to watch! Owen Sound Poet Laureate’s collection reaches out from printed word to multimedia, all for ecopoetics!
Day 11 Susan McMaster, Crossing Arcs: Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me
Black Moss Press: poignant, powerful & funny a la fois.
Day 12 Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen, P.S.
@GapRiotPress, https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2022/04/katerina-vaughan-fretwell-ps-by-penn.html?
Day 13 Harold Rhenisch, Landings: Poems from Iceland
Essential, elemental poetry of the first and most ancient order
Day 14 Susan McCaslin, Heart Work
Gorgeous as ever @EkstasisEditions
Day 15 Patricia Keeney. ORPHEUS IN OUR WORLD
@NeoPoiesisPress. Contemporary inspired readings reclaim ancient hymns of Orpheus.
Day 16 Daphne Marlatt, THEN NOW
@talonbooks “verbal pathways” lead us in, lead us on.
Day 17 Diane Seuss, Frank: sonnets
So good!
Day 18 D.A. Lockhart. Go down Odawa way
@Kegedonce Press @WRiverLockhart wazhashkpoetry.com
Day19 @Tanis MacDonald, MOBILE
@bookhugpress “La Donna E Mobile” and so is this peripatetic collection!
Day 20 Sheri D Wilson, LOVE LETTER TO EMILY C
Sumptuous @FrontenacHouse
Day 21 Susan Musgrave, Origami Dove
Always on point @McClellandBooks
Day 22 Margaret Christakos, charger
Love this @talonbooks https://talonbooks.com/books/charger
Day 23 Kevin Andrew Heslop, The correct fury of your why is a mountain
A poet to watch… and to read.
Day 24 Joy Harjo, Poet warrior: a memoir
“The imagining needs praise as does any living thing.
We are evidence of this praise.”
Day 25 Yusuf Saadi, Pluviophile
“…do the dead hide inside
poems, in the corridor between stanzas, curling fetal @NightwoodEd
Day 26 Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night
“What remains is tone, the medium of the soul.”
Day 27 Anne Simpson, Light falls through you
Glorious.
Day 28 Carl Phillips, Pale colors in a tall field
So fine.
Day 29 Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother
Always fascinating work.
Day 30 Sadiqa de Meijer, The outer wards & Alfabet / alphabet: a memoir of a first language
Tender and tough: so good.
Day 31 POETS in RESPONSE to PERIL! An anthology of Canadian poets in support of Ukraine: https://rsitoski.bigcartel.com/
Check out #MyYearInBooks @goodreads to discover other books I read and/or shelved in 2022: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2022/20293326. For Canadian writing & for more poetry, another list of good books! https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/3465/.
Photo: Jim Kemp, 1950
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Penn Kemp 