girls in art (christina rothenbeck)

released just a couple of weeks ago, Girls in Art is christina rothenbeck's first chapbook, and it's available from dancing girl press (http://dulcetshop.ecrater.com/p/16193127/girls-in-art-christina-rothenbeck# ).

there are numerous reasons why you might enjoy this little book, one of course being its charming cover art. The poems in this collection touch on a wide range of subjects: egyptian miniatures, grey hair, fever dreams, laundry, frieda kahlo, nicknames, a robbery -- it's hard for me to pick a favorite.

rothenbeck's conversational tone makes her poems very accessible, and her evident interest in the world around her is contagious. the two recurring themes among these poems are the body and the mirror. observing her own body, at times as if it was someone else's, at times in pictures, at times in mirrors, she  manages to capture what it is to be alive in this world, and the desire to avoid, to redistribute some of these experiences.

"I could knit my own twin out of wire, / a little yarn for hair. Ghost double, mirror's mirror" she explains, "the unnameable growing inside me, / bundle of hair and bone and teeth. I've been hiding this / so carefully." (from I want to make someone feel this for me so I don't have to)

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892)

what i like most about her poetry is how it manages to subvert, to introduce the strange into the every-day: there is a certain domesticity to some of the poems here, but in the creases of that linen there is strangeness, the house is haunted, the girl is a ghost, tired of writing for the dead.

Suddenly there's all this noticing going on;
the light is almost painfully bright.
You're feeling everything at once --
like the world caught you watching
in the dark beneath its window. 

(from This is a troubling idea)

i thoroughly enjoyed this playful chapbook, and if any of the above sounds good to you, you might want to get a copy of your own. :)

Y (leslie adrienne miller)

thanks to the good folks as goodreads and the generous associates at graywolf press, i have this copy of the uncorrected proofs of leslie adrienne miller's Y right here beside me. with the madness of a busy semester behind me, i can finally give it the attention it deserves. here goes.

the book caught my eye immediately for two reasons: the one letter title and the gorgeous cover. the cover is actually photograph of another artist's work. australian artist ron mueck did a series of oversized, hyperrealistic sculptures of people (including that of the boy on the cover), and they are gorgeously detailed and uncanny. in a nice way.

but the book has much more to offer. after the code-switching, language-playing title poem about the y chromosome that makes half of the world's population what they are by its presence, and the other half by its absence, there's the lucifer effect -- and even while i was reading it the first time, i could tell i was torn: the poem works beautifully, it's very effective emotionally, it's like a giant fist closing around my chest. not a good feeling. but fascinating. here's a taste:

Learning her limits is a game he suspects
he shouldn't play, but sometimes he's quiet
on purpose: some funny place in him likes
to see her struggle to locate whatever he is
beyond squirm and din.

the boy like a predator teasing his prey, an elderly neighbour who is nearly blind. she knows he's there but she can't see him. and this is where, tacky as it sounds, this poem breaks my heart:

Crouched in a shrub, he waits
for the moment to unfurl its enormous flock
of risks, only to wheel back and settle again/
He waits until her smile begins to slide, until
the inevitable stumble, and there it is --
tingle of dark cause, sensation ajar,
rippling across his scalp. 

that slipping smile. it gets me. i've seen it. i have a soft spot for old people -- i grew up around old people. i got to know three of my great-grandmothers and several of their sisters. from very early on i learned the 'right' way to act around old people, how to respond to their occasional loss of context, how to learn their limits, not to play with them, but to respect them. what also gets me is how well 'the lucifer effect' is captured in this simple, short poem.

the collection is interspersed with 'adversaria' -- mental notes miller made while researching for her poems, tidbits of information, like petit fours of science. a particularly beautiful one is on page 15. it talks about roget's DNA, and says that it contains genetic palindromes. i suspect miller loves the research part of her work as much as i do for my own writing. it's these little sparkles in science texts that make the digging worthwhile.

(slightly adapted from gray's anatomy)

notes on a suprasternal notch talks about the body and being in one's own body, responding with the body through instinct and primal urge. playing with the vocabulary of anatomy, miller describes how even a view can turn the skeleton keys inside us:

[...] a view
of a man squatting to read
for a towel on a summer beach
his shoulders forward so the stunning V
of him ignites in you own nether notch

the suprasternal notch, by the way, is the jugular notch, the small hollow where your clavicles meet at the base of your neck. for random association, i remember it was of particular interest to the central character in the english patient when talking to his lover. in any case, now you know what that little hollow place is called.

the following adversaria section goes back to the image of primal responses in the body:

I believe that when I visit a zoo my muscular response changes as I move 

from the hippopotamus house to the cage of the weasels. 

and then, in cambiata. miller considers another peculiar experience where the body has its way: the breaking of a boy's voice. here, the boy is jean-baptiste maunier, a french singer and actor. his last great performance and his last release was in 2005, when he recorded one last duet before his voice broke, to "deliver ever after / only ordinary music, the round nub / of his Adam's apple rocking in grief."

there are lots more poems to explore in Y. this is a collections of poems that are concerned with the body, with our agency, our animal instincts, our peculiar emotional worlds. if any of the above sounds good to you, go get a copy of this book.

birds & bees & the city: minot's "lust & other stories"

disclaimer: i wanted to get this review done before leaving for mississippi but, obviously, didn't, what with all the packing and paperwork and all that jazz... so i am sorry this is not as in-depth as i would have liked it to be, but i really wanted to let you know about this book in any case. 

i guess you'll just have to read it for yourself if you want more.

______________

"lust" is another book i picked off the public bookshelf. these are short short stories, and like the title story, all of them are about, well, lust. physical love. how boys and girls, men and women are and are not made for each other, how they click and don't click, how love and Love do not always overlap.

this is from the title story, one in a series of memories of boys past:

You'd go on walks to get off campus. It was raining like hell, my sweater sopped as a wet sheep. Tim pinned me to a tree, the woods light brown and dark brown, a white house half hidden with the lights already on. The water was as loud as a crowd hissing. He made certain comments about my forehead, about my cheeks. (p.4)

minot's narrator is straight-forward, honest, and observant. the book starts out with the narrator's memories of growing up, noticing how boys and men begin to act differently, treat her (and other girls) differently, how she experiences adolescence:

Certain nights you'd feel a certain surrender, maybe if you'd had wine. The surrender would be forgetting yourself and you'd put your nose to his neck and feel like a squirrel, safe, at rest, in a restful dream. But then you'd start  to slip from that and the dark would come in and there'd be a cave. (p.7)

the stories are subtle, yet frank. from teenagers via hipsters to liaised couples and old friends, minot creates and illuminates love in its peculiar and commonplace forms, its complications and effects. this is not a collection of romance stories. it is not sappy. it is also not a sexy sort of book. it is, however, intimate and personal and intensely interesting. 

pale horse, pale rider (porter)

i have to admit i had never heard of porter before a friend recommended "pale horse, pale rider" to me. the book contains three short stories (or, novels as the author preferred to call them, detesting the word "novella"): 

1. old mortality
2. noon wine
3. pale horse, pale rider

the copy i have is a browned, formerly eggshell coloured 1962 signet paperback that, undeniably, must have spent years on a smoker's shelf - not read, but exposed to lots of smoke. the lower quarter of the spine is brittle with a tear like it's been bent, but otherwise it is a good reading copy. this group of stories was first published in the 1930s. 

detail from "apocalypse"
by vasnetsov

i started with the title story, pale horse, pale rider, which in this edition (but not in all) comes last. the title is a reference to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: the fourth horseman is death, on a pale horse. porter's tells the tale of two lovers who cannot be together because of world war 1, as well as a portrait of the circumstances of miranda, a young journalist who is the focal point of the story.

the whole, for me, falls into four parts: a very short part at the beginning, where she "meets" the pale rider, then her work and economic concerns, meeting adam, and the influenza. the first and last part, rather dream-like and disorienting, not only drew me in but drained me of energy while reading, while the other parts are much more clear and, i guess, illustrate her lucid state of mind.

old mortality i found easier to read. at times, i fell in love with little passages here and there. this story is split intentionally into three parts:

part 1: 1885 - 1902
part 2: 1904
part 3: 1912

in part 1 we meet the sisters miranda (8 at the time) and maria (12), who see their family and their own destinies through the stories about other family members. (this miranda may well be the same person as in pale horse, pale rider, only younger, and, in the last part, older.) the grandmother is instrumental in making those stories "real" in the sense that she is the keeper of tangible evidence to go with the stories: letters, photographs, a wedding dress.

Photographs, portraits by inept painters who meant earnestly to flatter, and the festival garments folded away in dry herbs and camphor were disappointing when the girls tried to the living beings created in their minds by the breathing words of their elders. Grandmother, compelled in her blood twice a year by the change of seasons, would sit nearly all of one day beside old trunks and boxes in the lumber room, unfolding layers of garments and small keepsakes; she spread them out on sheets on the floor around her, crying over certain things, nearly always the same things, looking again at pictures in velvet cases, unwrapping locks of hair and dried flowers, crying gently and easily as if tears were the only pleasure she had left. 

If Maria and Miranda were very quiet, and touched nothing until it was offered, they might sit by her at these times, or come and go. There was a tacit understanding that her grief was strictly her own, and must not be noticed or mentioned. (p.11)

apart from the girls, their aunt amy, whom they have never met, is an important, if absent character here.
after refusing his advances for years, and after a scandal at a dance and a shooting, amy suddenly decides to give in to gabriel and marry him. some weeks after the wedding, she dies. mysterious aunt amy is important to the girls, even if the painting of her does not strike either girl as beautiful. in the family's stories, and hence in their minds, amy is (was) wonderful.

the defining impact of stories told on their perception of reality goes further than idealized family members: when their father takes them to see some shakespeare plays (they are not allowed trivial entertainment),

Miranda thought the magnificent lady in black velvet was truly the Queen of Scots, and was pained to know that the real Queen had died long ago, and not at all on the night she, Miranda, had been present. (p. 15)

part two tells of the two sisters' time away from home, in a convent school in new orleans. miranda has, in the meantime, decided she will never grow into a tall beautiful woman, and toys with the idea of becoming a race jockey. both girls have strong ideas about stories. when they come across a fiction paperback, they read it but do not take it seriously, taking from the book just one word: "immured" - as a more romantic adjective for their time at the school. (p. 31)

It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else,  with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them. (p. 32)

during the time at the convent, the girls briefly meet uncle gabriel, who is nothing like the romantic poet they had constructed in their minds from the stories they were told, and his hostile second wife.

the last part takes place on a train, as miranda, then 18 and recently married, travels to uncle gabriel's funeral. by chance, she meets old cousin eva, whom she has never met before and also only heard stories about. the stories mainly focused on eva's lack of a decent chin and her (supposedly) consequential life as a spinster. during the train ride, cousin eva tells a different version of the stories about amy and gabriel and the shooting. miranda comes away disillusioned and with the conviction that, at least, she will know the truth of her own life, her own story.

noon wine - a gripping story. i am trying to think what i can say about it without giving too much away, because this story relies much on plot events, and not so much on the characters' internal goings-ons as the other two. i hope you'll read the story anyhow, and if you don't want spoilers do not read past the following paragraph! :)

the setting: the title refers to a (real or fictitious) scandinavian drinking song about waking up feeling so great that one drinks all the wine ("likker") normally saved for the lunch break in the morning already, and feels even better. now, the story is set in south texas, and the notion of feeling great while drunk and working on the farm strikes farm owner mr thompson as bizarre, since he can barely stand the heat sober. the man who plays this song every day on his harmonica, mr helton, never touches a drop of alcohol for as long as thompson knows him. mr helton appears out of nowhere (well, out of north dakota) and asks for work, which mr thompson is happy to provide him with, for low wages. helton is a quiet character, very private and not always polite, but a hard worker and very good at what he does (tending the animals, making butter, straightening out the farm, later even making cheese for them to sell) and becomes almost a part of the family over the years.

--- spoilers ---

after many years, a stranger appears in search of helton. he makes some unsettling claims about the man who has been helping the thompson family immensely for years. he tells thompson that helton is an escaped lunatic, and a murderer at that, and the farm owner realizes this is a bounty hunter of sorts. he has to take sides. when thompson refuses to help him capture and handcuff helton, the stranger pulls out a knife. helton, hearing the argument, comes to thompsons' aid and there is a brief fight - believing the stranger is stabbing, even killing helton, thompson tries to knock him out with an axe, killing him accidentally. helton runs but then dies when caught. there are no knife wounds on him, but still, thompson goes free, claiming self-defense. despite the verdict (that he is not guilty) nobody believes him.  a week after the trial, having told his side of the story to every single neighbour, finding his wife stricken with panic attacks at night, and hearing his sons warn him not to ever do her any harm again, he gives up, writes one last testimony and shoots himself in the fields.

--- end of spoilers ---

if you wanted to, you could look at the images of manliness in this story. mr thompson has clear ideas about what is "man's work" and what is "woman's work" and what is "paid help's work". helton does not, apparently. (p. 74) there is also the passage where thompson and the stranger compare their stumps of chewing tobacco. (p. 91). you'll find some more stuff in here if you want.

anyway, thanks for recommendation, i am glad i read this. all three stories (novels) are very different from each other and well-written and interesting in their own way.

puppets without strings: the magic toyshop (angela carter)

it's a little ironic, really, that i bought this book in autumn 1999 (when i first came to reading university) just to carry it around with me / have it wait in boxes and on shelves until last saturday, and then read the whole thing in two days. but i am glad it waited for me!

virago edition, "the magic toyshop"
by angela carter

this is quite the book - it really drew me in. the main character, a fifteen year-old english girl named melanie, the oldest of three siblings, is an introvert teenager who longs to figure out her place in the world, who she will be, who she could or should be - and she has, from the outset, quite a specific idea of what she wants from life: 

She stuck moon-daisies in her long hair and looked at herself in her mirror as if she were a photograph in her own grown-up photograph album. 'Myself at fifteen.' And, following, the pictures of her children [...] and pet dogs, and summer-snapped future holidays. [...] the pet dogs, would they be Yorkshire terriers or corgis; or noble, hawk-nosed Afghan hounds or a pair of white greyhounds on a golden chain? 

She said to the daisy girl with her big, brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy.' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven. (p.7-8)

melanie is at that point where she wants to shed her childhood self like an old skin. her secretly trying on her mother's wedding gown is more than just a private rite of passage, - her entire life changes from here.  like the wedding gown, the life that she is cast into seems too large, bound to trip her up and take away her freedom of moving, running, climbing. finding herself suddenly orphaned and forced to move, with her brother and baby-sister, to london to live with relatives she has never met, melanie suddenly finds herself in a whole different world, where she does not have her own perfumed bar of soap or even hot running water. the baby and the younger brother are quickly integrated into the new 'family' but melanie feels like an outsider. She feels that somehow she has caused all this.

Eve must have felt like this on the way east out of Eden,' she thought. 'And it was Eve's fault.' (p.94)

the central conflict in this book is - as i experienced it - between melanie and her uncle philip, the toymaker. secretly, he is also a puppeteer, he not only makes elaborate, almost life-size puppets, but also performs plays for his captive family audience. this is exactly why melanie draws his attention on herself - because he cannot control her like, for instance, he controls his wife, who has been mute since the day of their wedding. how interesting is the description of the necklace he gives to his wife on the day they are married:

The necklace was a collar of dull silver, two hinged silver pieces knobbed with moonstones which snapped into place around her lean neck and rose up almost to her chin so that she could hardly move her head. It was heavy, crippling and precious and looked as though it might be very ancient, pre-Christian or possibly even pre-Flood although, in fact, it was not. [...] Wearing the collar, Aunt Margaret had to carry her head high and haughty as the Queen of Assyria, but above it her eyes were anxious and sad and not proud at all. (pp.112-113)

there is so much going on in this book in terms of human relationships, family and love relationships, in terms of symbolism (birds, muteness, etc), in terms of recurrent motifs (dogs, christian references, etc etc), that i don't want to try and touch on all if it, because it would just be skimming the surface while giving away too much of the plot. it is an intense book, without being graphic. this is powerful, startling writing. even though this book has been around since the late 1960s it is certainly no old hat.

She splashed the shreds of the absurd night out of her eyes with cold water. The well-iced shock of water did her good as it took her breath away; it impinged on her, it was palpable. Water is water. You can't argue with water. There it is. (p.182)

melanie herself is like water - when her family is broken up, she goes on, she runs through the cracks, and somehow goes around the obstacles her uncle constructs. in the end, the water runs through his fingers, he cannot hold it. by the time he realizes it, it is too late, and melanie's influence has dissolved the foundations of his regime of terror and forced silence. it is good not to see an attempt at explanation of especially the uncle's behavior. this story is not about guilt and innocence, good or bad. it is much more complex.

this is a coming-of-age story if you want to throw it into a category. i thoroughly enjoyed the book, - it scared me, it touched me, it made me awkward, it made me think. it is also a love story of sorts - not the soppy kind, but an awkward, detached, somewhat apprehensive but curious sort of relationship develops. at the end, we see a changed melanie, one who has taken charge of herself.

dusty answer (rosamond lehmann)

i finished dusty answer, and just in time too - while the book was in impeccable shape when i found it, it had been sitting on shelves in this family for the past 75 years or so and, well, i am guessing that i was its first (and probably its last) reader. the glue of the binding is breaking and the paper cover has begun to peel a little, despite my usual carefulness with books.

anyway, let me tell you about the book!
(spoiler alert: you might not want to read this if you still want to read the book for the simple enjoyment of it, because i am going to tell you what happens and how it ends!)

rosamond lehmann
(1901-1990)

the plot of "dusty answer" is simple, if you like: judith spends the duration of the novel trying to figure out who she loves, should love, should be loved by, or should not be loved by. her fixation is on roddy, although both martin and julian, who also lived next door to her as children, were kinder and nicer to her. when they grow up, judith is in for a bit of a surprise, - roddy sometimes plays along with her secret dreams, but also keeps odd company:

Tony Baring sat opposite and stared with liquid expressive blue eyes. He had a sensitive face, changing all the time, a wide mouth with beautiful sensuous lips, thick black hair and a broad white forehead with the eyebrows meeting above the nose, strongly marked and mobile. When he spoke he moved them, singly or together. His voice was soft and precious, and he had a slight lisp. He looked like a young poet.

so far so good, but -

Suddenly she noticed his hands - thin unmasculine hands - queer hands - making nervous appealing ineffectual gestures that contradicted the nobility of his head. She heard him call Roddy 'my dear'; and once 'darling'; and had a passing shock. (pp98-99)

not that roddy himself acts "unmasculine" - a little later he tells her about his past lovers: he's had "a French, an Austrian, a Russian - countless mistresses." (p.216)

then, there's jennifer baird, a stunning creature she meets at cambridge.

'Have you got a cigarette? Never mind... I've just learnt how to blow smoke-rings. I'll teach you.' More whistling. 'It's terrible to be so swayed by appearances. I'm afraid it's a sign of a weak character. Ugly people rouse all Hell's devils in me. And beautiful ones make me feel like the morning stars singing together. I want beauty, beauty, beauty.... Don't you? Lovely people round me, lovely stuffs, lovely colours - lashions and lashions of gorgeous things to touch and taste and look at and smell.' She flung her head back on its round white throat and took a deep sighing breath. 'O colours!... I could eat them. I'm awfully sensuous - I look it, don't you think? Or do I mean sensual? I always get them muddled; but I know it's unladylike to be one of them.' (pp.121-122)

jennifer's lust for life and her careless spontaneousness mesmerize judith.

'You love somebody, I think. Who is it you love?'

'I love nobody.'

Jennifer must never never know, suspect, dream for a moment....

'You mustn't love anybody,' said Jennifer. 'I should want to kill him. I should be jealous.' Her brooding eyes fell heavily on Judith's lifted face. 'I love you.'

And at those words, that look, Roddy faded again harmlessly: Jennifer blinded and enfolded her senses once more, and only Jennifer had power. (p.134)

when jennifer leaves cambridge, dropping out of school for mysterious reasons (to be with geraldine), she leaves judith a copper bowl that judith apparently had admired, with the comment that it was the nicest thing she'd ever owned, and more:

'It's all of me,' whispered Jennifer. (p.186)

left with questions, the promise of a letter with answers, and a copper bowl, judith focuses on roddy once again. she finally finds out, the hard way, that he is not the person she has been imagining for all these years after he takes offense at her passionate admission of her feelings towards him. after a romantic, secret midnight canoe-trip to a small island where he intends to say goodbye forever, and for some reason tells her he loves her (and they kiss passionately), she sends him a letter, which is causes the following exchange:

'Well,' - he hesitated. 'If a man wants to ask a girl to - marry him he generally asks her himself - do you see?'

'You mean - it was outrageous of me not to wait - to write like that?'

'I thought it a little odd.' (p.235)

they decide to never see each other again. heartbroken, still waiting for jennifer to explain herself in the promised letter, she moves on to martin, who introduces her to his mother and shows her his farm. he shoots a rabbit right in front of her, which reminds her of roddy who, unable to bear her sadness at the sight of a dead rabbit when they were children, buried the creature for her. reduced to a pile of sobbing misery, she lets martin comfort her and when he, too, tells her he loves her, she suggests he marry her, saying she would be his wife.

she knows it is the wrong thing to do, she does not love him, and breaks up the engagement a day later. they part, and never meet again. finally, julian, the last of the boys next door, finds her in paris, explaining that he had been waiting for his turn, and courts her. they have a great time together until they hear martin has died. their ways part. julian writes to her to tell her they also must not meet again.

finally, judith is on her own, and the long-awaited letter from jennifer arrives. jennifer also wants to not see judith again, explaining that while she still loves her, she does not deserve judith's love and concern. judith wants to see her again and they arrange to meet in cambridge. when jennifer doesn't show up, judith realizes she has come full circle and is now free.


i have to say the first hundred pages or so were tedious. the style, the character of judith, her thought patterns took some getting used to. the middle part, where she is at cambridge, is much more readable, more enjoyable because of all the beautiful descriptions and because things actually happen, while in the first part, it's mainly judith thinking about stuff.

why did i read the book in the first place?
because i was curious. the book itself, the physical object, was interesting to me (see previous post about albatross books), and seeing that rosamond lehmann was involved with the bloomsbury group and also quoted by simone de beauvoir made me even more curious. also, i will admit that the comment (on wikipedia) that "dusty answer" was a succes de scandale was a selling point. :)

this book is all about emotions, muchly so because judith is nothing but emotions and wonderings.

the men we meet in 'dusty answer' are unmasculine (tony), plain (martin), and hypermasculine (roddy), its women childlike (mariella, who even after having born her son still acts and looks like a child), unfeminine (geraldine, mabel) and hyperfeminine (jennifer).

judith is trying to find her way through this maze, and it is only toward the end that she realizes how much power she holds over how people react to her, how they see her. in the end, she realizes she as one single person had enough power to break apart the circle of familiar friends of the kids next door.

books from strangers / whistling for elephants

i am reading. a novel. and loving it. i got this book from a complete stranger, via the public bookshelf the mercator foundation set up downtown. the whole thing is simple enough:

it's a simple construction that keeps the books safe from wind and rain, while still letting you see what's there.  people can just take what they're interested in and / or drop of books they no longer need or want to share. of course a fair share of the books are lame old things but i continue to be surprised by some of what i find there. i stop by there at least once a week, have a look and tidy up the shelves a bit. i think every city, every town should have one of these! what a brilliant idea!

anyway, this is what i found on the public bookshelf yesterday:

1967 ladybird book, good shape

which, while fiction, is not the book i was talking about in the introductory sentence of this post. :) but i did want to mention this, because it is a neat little item - i remember when i volunteered at the reading oxfam bookshop we had a number of customers who came in for these little books especially; collectors who were looking for specific editions and many of whom found at least some of what they were looking for on our shelves. finding this on the public bookshelf was a big surprise for me - sure, i can see where the english-language romance novels, thrillers, and chick lit might come from, but to my knowledge these old ladybird books would have come from - a british / anglophile family or collector (more likely a collector, since it is in such good shape). 

anyway, this is the "real" find for this week:

whistling for the elephants
by sandi toksvig

part of what piqued my curiosity here was that i had heard neither the title nor the name of the author before, and it did not look like chick-lit. i opened the book at the beginning and ran into the main character, a girl named dorothy:

I was ten. Almost certainly I was wearing a short tartan kilt (Clan McLadybird), a white shirt, a very neatly tied tie, a blue blazer and a peaked sailor's cap which hid my long curly ginger hair. No-one made me dress like that. It was a kind of school uniform I had invented for myself. In the photos the combination tie and skirt made me look a strange boy / girl hybrid. My face, born with a frown, was obscured by the peak of my hat. I had spent most of my early childhood shielded from a full view of anything. The cap and I were inseparable. I was, even in my tender years, trying to develop a rakish look. I spent many hours trying to persuade people to call me Cap'n instead of Dorothy. It didn't work. Not a popular child. Not even with my parents. 

by then i knew dorothy and i would be fast friends. :) she is a truly intriguing girl who is not so much raised as she just sort of grows and raises herself. her most prized possession is a "piece of illuminated manuscript" that illustrates the structure of the animal kingdom according to (supposedly) 10th century chinese thought. reading up on this just now, i found this is a direct quote also cited by borges (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge's_Taxonomy to read this thing - quite poetic really!) first it seems that the reason dorothy (never dottie!) sees this item as a treasure is because it was the only gift she ever received that was unasked for, even unexpected, but this whole theme of animals is deeply woven into the fabric of this novel and no doubt will play a vital role in her story. the "real" relationships, actual rapport, happens only between humans and animals here, among people who are just figuring out how to live after WW2.

dorothy's british family move much and, as we join her, have just moved to america, and for the first time, they could become a real family in a real home - maybe. probably not. the relationship between her and her parents is somewhat... antiseptic.

the book is full of great character descriptions and little observations dorothy makes concerning those around her, such as this when she has entered an (assumedly) abandoned grand house and admires a large painting full of animals:

"We shall have a Chinese Garden of Intelligence." I jumped as a voice spoke behind me. I thought for a second it came from the picture. "A Great Menagerie. Like King George at Windsor or the Duke of Bedford. Tropical princes shall come and bring us barbaric offerings of tigers, leopards and creatures no man has ever seen before. We shall have such a collection that the Emperor of Abyssinia will hear of it and wish to come." 

I turned but couldn't see anyone. Then, amongst the great drapes which covered the walls, something moved. A giant insect woman. All in brown. Its wings closed about itself. It spoke to me. 

"No one, not even in Egypt, China, India or Rome, will be able to boast of such exotica."

The huge bug shimmered toward me. She was maybe in her late thirties but when you're a kid everyone just looks old. She was probably as old as Mother, just less set in aspic. 

in any case, since i got the book yesterday i've read almost half of it and can't wait to read on. i am glad i checked the bookshelf yesterday, and - thanks, stranger, for sharing this book with me!

the beauty of bits & bobs (carson's "if not, winter")

so... here is the book i have been carrying with me longer and that i have read in more than in any other over the past 12 months: anne carson's if not, winter - fragments of sappho. if i have spent so much time with this book, why is it i never really posted about it here? afterall, this is where i pour my booklovin' heart out!

to be honest, i just don't know. i just don't know what to say about this book, other than that it utterly fascinated me from the moment i took it off the shelf in the small second hand bookstore in downtown salt lake. i only knew of sappho at that time, i knew about her - second hand knowledge, rather than having read any of her poetry. i had, however, read carson before - thanks to a cool poetry teacher who introduced me to the autobiography of red, which just swept me off my feet, it is truly an amazing book. i will have to tell you more about that another time...

now, what is this book? what carson has done here is place the fragments and her own translations of them next to each other, on pages facing each other. what makes the whole thing even more interesting is how she keeps the missing bits, how she tries to recreate the visual experience of the fragmented texts.

some of the fragments are longer than others. some are complete sentences or at least phrases, others are missing bits in the middle or on the edges. carson has found a good way of marking these sorts of "holes" in the text with a simple system of brackets.

some fragments consist of just one or two words. for me, those were the most intriguing ones. like these: (the layout is me playing around)

fragment 119:

cloth dripping

fragment 145:

do not move stones

fragment 176:

transparent dress

fragment 191:

celery

fragment 192:

gold anklebone cups

these made my fingers itch and my mind started putting together poems around those fragments. i ended up with a chapbook's worth of poems all triggered by fragments from carson's translation. i didn't do this with the intent of recreating anything, rather, i was making something new out of something that was already there. creative recycling, i guess? in any case, i really enjoyed this! 

but i didn't just have fun... i learned one or two things as well. (which, really, to me is also thoroughly enjoyable, but that's beside the point - or is it.) carson gives a good introduction to the background of sappho as well as the manuscript(s) she retranslates here. she also provides insightful notes to many fragments and words, and a "who's who" - very helpful. 

carson's translation is very readable, and she treats the original text with much respect. she doesn't go about assuming and claiming to recreate the original text. she lets the fragments breathe, makes available what is there - i doubt i would have read as much of sappho's verse had i bought another translation. and i know i would not have looked at the original text, for the simple reason that the language is beyond me. (which touches on the next little project i have in mind, and why i chose not to pick it for my research topic for my ph.d. applications. i have been reading gilgamesh. in translation of course. can't see myself learning to read cuneiform anytime soon... but more about that another time!)

if you are curious about sappho, even just a bit, this might be a good place to go. and the paperback has been out for a while, so you should be able to get it second hand too. (mind you, i am hanging on to my copy! not that anyone else would want it now, it's been very patient and longsuffering, traveling many miles in my bag and letting me use the blank spaces.)

________

p.s. - i just saw that you can actually look at excerpts online, right here:
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1102/sappho/
with links like this one:
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1102/sappho/excerpt_48.html
thank you, bold type!

chill poetry for eyes and ears (Jean Sprackland)

so... today was definitely the right day for reading jean sprackland's collection Tilt. the wind, the temperature on the train to work, the mutterings of the tracks. but before i tell you about this book, just a quick note on the side - a site i came across when looking up jean online - this might be interesting to you if you like poetry and if you are, like me, curious.

i believe poetry is about as personal as writing could possibly get, so hearing the voice of the poet is always interesting to me. i remember when, in school, a teacher played us a recording of dylan thomas reading "fern hill," "do not go gentle," and - most of all - "death shall have no dominion" - i was stunned. (the links will take you to youtube videos with audio recordings of thomas reading these poems)

anyway. here is a site that has lots of recordings of english language poets reading their own work: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/poetWelcome.do (and the link to jean sprackland is, she is also involved in the making and running of this site)

and now the book. it is a fine case of packaging matching content. the book itself is slim, with a cool, simple cover design. the title poem is quite something. so are pretty much all of the others, too! poems containing cows, crime scene investigation, anesthesia, love, miracles, loss, pirates and sandcastles. you will run into fish and chips and babies and waterfalls and shards of ice on a beach. the strength of her poems are in the simplicity of the images, and the chilling moment when it all falls into place.

there are many "cold" images here, so maybe that's why reading this today, on an autumny october day, felt so right. here is an example:

...

But thirty miles south,

in another town, [the ice] creaks

under the pier, where someone kneels,

staring down like a god

through a damaged sky, onto wilderness

of ridges and blue shadows.

(from: Ice on the Beach)

what i also found very interesting was the sequence of poems titled Miracles. six poems look at the ministry of Christ from an angle that is tangible, surprising, anachronistic - sprackland transplants doubting thomas onto a bridge across the M6 (a busy english motorway), translates the first miracle of water turned to wine (at the wedding in cana), and lets the reader witness the casting out of an evil spirit. i personally really enjoyed the way these stories - handed down over generations and generations - take on a new life in a new light.

the book begins with lying down, waiting, and ends with moving about, an engine, a powerful force for good, "breathing in the spoilt air, / and breathing it out clean."

i was going to put another snippet or two here but... i don't want to give too much away. it would be difficult to pick out bits and pieces and still do the book justice. i guess you may just have to read it yourself...

a bucket full of hair and an eye wide open: one eye'd leigh (k. kilalea)

what can i say? i could tell you that i read the whole of katharine kilalea's one eye'd leigh in one go today. i could tell you that i accidentally put a mark on the cover signing a receipt. or that when i looked up from reading i realized there was a robin, less than a foot away from me, watching me and - i suspect - trying to take a peak. i could also tell you that the book now has one dogs-ear - and it makes the only one poem in this book that i did not think was really, really good.

the poems - for the most part - are free form, at times prose-y, but almost all uncluttered: no unnecessary words, just the important bits, just the interesting bits, with a wonderful eye for detail. here is a bit i loved:

I stood in the flowerbed with a spade and your absence

and my boots turned a red red.

It felt like the end of us.

The winter garden we'd planted together 

bloomed in your footsteps as you left. 

I lost what i couldn't carry: 

a necklace, a vest,

a very valuable pair of socks. 

(from: Planting Bulbs at Arnold Circus)

i also love it when a poem gets me interested in something, or i learn new words and meanings through reading a poem. i was intrigued by the liberty cap, which i assumed (from just reading the poem) to be some sort of plant. turns out (now that i have had a chance to look it up) i wasn't that far off. well, sort of. :-) but even not knowing the connotations of the "liberty cap," the poem reads beautifully and tells an intriguing story: a fallen girl, a boy in the woods, paternal trees, nobbly knees, something picked with the innocence of youth. then of course the term liberty cap has a bunch of meanings, all of which seem to be blended in somehow. i like word play and i like how somehow the poem makes use of so many layers of the same word.

kilalea, originally from south africa, now lives and works in london. carcanet press actually have recordings of her reading two of her poems, on their website, - interestingly enough, one of them is one i thought was brilliant, and the other one is the one i marked, as mentioned above, with a dogs-ear. i will put both links here in case you are interested, and let you judge for yourself:

the boy with the fire in his boot:
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/data/audio/9781857549928_audio01.mp3

the way we look is a game of chess:
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/data/audio/9781857549928_audio02.mp3

i am glad i picked up this book. and i shall be looking for more by the same author. :-) i hope there will be more soon! btw, one eye'd leigh was shortlisted for the 2009 costa book-awards.