Pino Coluccio’s Class Clown is a competent volume of poetry. I mean that in senses good and bad. The iambs bop along like a crisp military parade; the rhymes arrive with metronomic regularity. But admirable prosody can only take a poem so far. Especially with the staggeringly fecund repositories of hard formal verse, a poem – even a stanza – set to that tune better have a twist or ten in its concomitant content. In Class Clown, the concerns (regret, aging, loss, failure) have been handled – from Hardy to Larkin – with far more nuance and complexity. The poems’ sonic wellsprings, then, emit only surface echo, and are quickly folded back into their sources.
Surely, the reader may say, there are many exceptions and surprises. This is only apparent. Take “A Toronto Bike Courier Foresees His Death”, the last stanza of which is repeated below:
I tallied every big what if.
It was a quick and easy math
to pedal from a beta’s life
towards an alpha’s metal death.
Tough fate, no? But the click-and-clack pattern works aside the neutral tone to create an emotional effect as tragic as a ripped cuticle. This is mild entertainment, accomplished, more wit than passion, ultimately a series of exercises plotted and filled in. The narrator, despite various personae, houses a consistent personality, and is of the light ABAB world-weary wisdom-dispensing type. The theme is the trampled one of regret for risks, even modest actions, not undertaken in youth, and, with that, a depression over old age and an unlived life: (“To a happy past and sad,/and to one I never had.”, from “Bow Tie”). A book to appreciate, not one to get you to think too much or to feel too intensely.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Friday, February 7, 2020
Arleen Pare’s The Girls With Stone Faces
Arleen Pare’s The Girls With Stone Faces is a loving, creative, historical tribute to, and adoration of, Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, Canadian sculptors and lovers. Throughout the poetry collection, the focus is on the artists’ work, a welcome approach where much creative biography instead teases out speculative explorations, psychological fantasies that illuminate more the authors' obsessions than the mysteries of the artists under study. Pare enjoys the symbolism of both women shaping and refining their visions through the transformation of gross materials into spiritually revealing products which retain the earthiness of the source material. “How much a pink marble mouth/must lift at the left corner,/almost into a smile”, the concluding lines to “Technicalities of Neoclassical Sculpture in the Beaux Arts Tradition”, is particularly effective and suggestive. Much of Pare’s other material, though, is less subtle. From the same poem: “Point, line, and depth: these form the dimensions of sculpture”. The short sentence fragment and the frequent space-pauses create an additive effect which work when outlining the sculptors’ tools of the trade, and how those resources are marshalled for work. Elsewhere, however, the clipped approach irritates by leaving either a scattered or faux-heightened effect, i.e., “The northern lights. The thought of. Violet/and shape-shifting green.”
The biggest flaw in The Girls With Stone Faces is the project itself. We’re inundated with poetry collections that have a unifying theme or narrative. In rare cases, a gifted poet can carry the subject along by exploring many facets (different voices, complimentary interlocking stories, tonal shifts, a resulting speculative future, etc.) of the material, but in almost every instance, an elevator pitch, grant-friendly proposition like this will include a lot of weak and redundant poems. Pare’s volume is no exception. Here’s one example I’ll include for illustrative purposes because of its brevity. In full, this is “The Mothers”:
there were mothers
one for each girl
Frances and Florence
each in their place
but
there was no poison there
at least
not enough
Now in the context of the book as a whole, this poem isn’t egregiously bad because it keeps the narrative clicking along. But divorce it from its nesting place on page 21 and thrust it into a journal, or read it to someone on its own, unenhanced by its backstory or surrounding associations, and it sinks like shares in a junior mining start-up after the CEO appears in handcuffs on an MSNBC perp walk video clip. Nothing even slightly interesting happens in those twenty-four words, whether in diction, rhythm, lyricism, structure, voice, emotion. Again, you could become as near an expert on these two lives as is Pare, but that in itself would only (and only possibly) create some biographical interest. A poem’s responsibilities lie elsewhere. I harp on this point because the book-length study is now endemic in CanPo. Poets defend the project-book with the argument that the ‘process’ is more important than the individual poem. But a poem is an individual unit. (Pare’s poems are separate entries, each with its own title.) Poets try to get around this by eliminating titles and linking ‘entries’ by double spaces, a series of dashes, ‘part thirty-eight’, or epigraph interruptions, to name only a few ploys. There’s a long history to this, of course. But for every Whitman, there’re a thousand Olsons.
Pare could have pared and sculpted a lot of clay from this volume, and the reader would have been left with a half-dozen fairly good poems. And maybe that’s more than could have been expected anyway, given the subject’s constraints.
The biggest flaw in The Girls With Stone Faces is the project itself. We’re inundated with poetry collections that have a unifying theme or narrative. In rare cases, a gifted poet can carry the subject along by exploring many facets (different voices, complimentary interlocking stories, tonal shifts, a resulting speculative future, etc.) of the material, but in almost every instance, an elevator pitch, grant-friendly proposition like this will include a lot of weak and redundant poems. Pare’s volume is no exception. Here’s one example I’ll include for illustrative purposes because of its brevity. In full, this is “The Mothers”:
there were mothers
one for each girl
Frances and Florence
each in their place
but
there was no poison there
at least
not enough
Now in the context of the book as a whole, this poem isn’t egregiously bad because it keeps the narrative clicking along. But divorce it from its nesting place on page 21 and thrust it into a journal, or read it to someone on its own, unenhanced by its backstory or surrounding associations, and it sinks like shares in a junior mining start-up after the CEO appears in handcuffs on an MSNBC perp walk video clip. Nothing even slightly interesting happens in those twenty-four words, whether in diction, rhythm, lyricism, structure, voice, emotion. Again, you could become as near an expert on these two lives as is Pare, but that in itself would only (and only possibly) create some biographical interest. A poem’s responsibilities lie elsewhere. I harp on this point because the book-length study is now endemic in CanPo. Poets defend the project-book with the argument that the ‘process’ is more important than the individual poem. But a poem is an individual unit. (Pare’s poems are separate entries, each with its own title.) Poets try to get around this by eliminating titles and linking ‘entries’ by double spaces, a series of dashes, ‘part thirty-eight’, or epigraph interruptions, to name only a few ploys. There’s a long history to this, of course. But for every Whitman, there’re a thousand Olsons.
Pare could have pared and sculpted a lot of clay from this volume, and the reader would have been left with a half-dozen fairly good poems. And maybe that’s more than could have been expected anyway, given the subject’s constraints.
Friday, January 31, 2020
Carmine Starnino's Leviathan
Carmine Starnino’s Leviathan explores familiar ground for the poet, that of paternal identity. Here, it’s not only the father that’s studied, but also the father’s son, also a father. Other men – strangers – fill a few pages, perhaps also fathers. An easy synopsis would indicate that the poet is determined not to repeat the mistakes of his forebears while co-raising his own children. But that surface narrative’s been ploughed through so often and thoroughly, another chapter could be akin to showing up in Barkerville in 2019 with pick and pan, expecting to find more than a flake or two of gold.
“San Pellegrino” is the cornerstone poem of Leviathan. Nearing four pages, an unusually long effort in the Starnino corpus, the narrator-poet commences in perhaps the blandest opening line of verse you’ll chance upon in a while: “I sit here facing a glass of water. I have a family: a son, baby daughter.” But over the breach of that first line, the poem explodes: “Life’s harder. Harder, and sadder. My father/has stage IV lung cancer.” Again, though, here the reader may pause, fearing another in an endless line of poems about parents with terminal illnesses. (Entire books have been fashioned thusly, making one wish that an inanimate object could suffer the same fate before sputtering to page fourteen.) Starnino doesn’t bury himself in a lugubrious elegy, however. Though the ostensible focus is on his father – (“Epic snorer, inveterate jaywalker, and, when he lost his temper,/a spanker.”) – the poem’s more a study of the narrator’s ontological polarities: Apollo vs Dionysus. The father embodies the latter, and the speaker’s seeming distance, even antipathy, towards the elder’s actions are belied by a loving anguish not far from the surface. The speaker, by the bare fact of writing such an elaborately detailed poem, counters with reason, but the two states can never be fully integrated, which explains the lack of resolution in the closing lines: “[I] will sit here, staring deeper and farther/into this glass of water until that point everything becomes clearer.” The speaker is still caught in reason’s attempt to make order, to provide a final explanation, but, ultimately, he’s too intelligent to think it possible. In an ironic twist, then, it’s Dionysus that prevails, after all, despite the father’s many indiscretions and faults.
Elsewhere, the same dichotomy is teased into a conflicted admiration for disordered vitality. “The Factory Lifer” is a dispassionate study of a “Piss-eyed/nicotine wreck/perving over secretaries.” No one, perhaps, but a fellow traveler in that world is going to commend one who, after being glanced at, would “draw a thumb/across his throat”, but fascination remains for the outsized energy, the pure ‘fuck you’ attitude, the fate that awaits a man whose upbringing, genes, work opportunities, and lack of natural reflection dooms him to a life of depraved alienation. By contrast, Starnino’s images and descriptions are coldly, exactly rendered. The poem’s a minor gem.
Quite a few poems concentrate on the speaker’s love for his children, the most successful being the collection’s opener, “Shadow Puppet”: “The point is to make/something/from the laying on//of nothing”. The narrator’s lawn also receives metaphorical attention in several poems, the best, “The Manly Arts”, being a humorous and well-executed ars poetica: “getting high/on the scent of order it exhaled”.
“San Pellegrino” is the cornerstone poem of Leviathan. Nearing four pages, an unusually long effort in the Starnino corpus, the narrator-poet commences in perhaps the blandest opening line of verse you’ll chance upon in a while: “I sit here facing a glass of water. I have a family: a son, baby daughter.” But over the breach of that first line, the poem explodes: “Life’s harder. Harder, and sadder. My father/has stage IV lung cancer.” Again, though, here the reader may pause, fearing another in an endless line of poems about parents with terminal illnesses. (Entire books have been fashioned thusly, making one wish that an inanimate object could suffer the same fate before sputtering to page fourteen.) Starnino doesn’t bury himself in a lugubrious elegy, however. Though the ostensible focus is on his father – (“Epic snorer, inveterate jaywalker, and, when he lost his temper,/a spanker.”) – the poem’s more a study of the narrator’s ontological polarities: Apollo vs Dionysus. The father embodies the latter, and the speaker’s seeming distance, even antipathy, towards the elder’s actions are belied by a loving anguish not far from the surface. The speaker, by the bare fact of writing such an elaborately detailed poem, counters with reason, but the two states can never be fully integrated, which explains the lack of resolution in the closing lines: “[I] will sit here, staring deeper and farther/into this glass of water until that point everything becomes clearer.” The speaker is still caught in reason’s attempt to make order, to provide a final explanation, but, ultimately, he’s too intelligent to think it possible. In an ironic twist, then, it’s Dionysus that prevails, after all, despite the father’s many indiscretions and faults.
Elsewhere, the same dichotomy is teased into a conflicted admiration for disordered vitality. “The Factory Lifer” is a dispassionate study of a “Piss-eyed/nicotine wreck/perving over secretaries.” No one, perhaps, but a fellow traveler in that world is going to commend one who, after being glanced at, would “draw a thumb/across his throat”, but fascination remains for the outsized energy, the pure ‘fuck you’ attitude, the fate that awaits a man whose upbringing, genes, work opportunities, and lack of natural reflection dooms him to a life of depraved alienation. By contrast, Starnino’s images and descriptions are coldly, exactly rendered. The poem’s a minor gem.
Quite a few poems concentrate on the speaker’s love for his children, the most successful being the collection’s opener, “Shadow Puppet”: “The point is to make/something/from the laying on//of nothing”. The narrator’s lawn also receives metaphorical attention in several poems, the best, “The Manly Arts”, being a humorous and well-executed ars poetica: “getting high/on the scent of order it exhaled”.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood
Philosophy and nostalgia make a disastrous combo. In On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, the volume that unbelievably – even in the context of other bizarre winners of major poetry awards in Canada throughout the years – scored Richard Harrison a Gov Gen victory, the narrator has the demeanor and voice of one who nonchalantly and inoffensively sidles alongside you in a long line-up and proceeds to spill his guts about his past, unaware or (worse) unconcerned that you’ve pegged him as a verbose bore, however sincere, within the first twenty seconds.
These poems are interminable. Length is relative. Most entries are only one to two full pages, but the narrative development is static, the details bland, the images disperse, the conclusions obvious. It all makes you pray the line-up in front of you starts moving again, or for the self-immersed rambler to catch the eye of a more promising sounding board. Three poems in, the reader is confronted by “Gone”, possibly the worst published poem I’ve read this century. It has a plethora of faults, including, but not limited to: bald prose (“When the groom’s mother died on the way to the wedding in San Diego,/it became a wedding from an American novel.”); cliches (“Everything fell into place”); ugly syntax and ugly common phrasing (“setting the whole thing up”); hysterical, false similes (“a song stuck in your head is/your mind reaching for poetry like a drowning mouth reaching for air”); and false spiritual wisdom combined with poor grammar (“you never know how beautiful air, or light, or life are until you must gasp.”).
There are brief passages of skill and verve here and there, lightning flashes that, even in their surprise, throw into dramatic relief the depth of the surrounding darkness: “She had looked for sweets/the colours of childhood comfort/and instead received bad-bread green and disinfectant yellow,/and a kind of teal that almost glowed/like a seabird in an oil spill.” from “Colour Code”. While waiting twelve poems till the next flash, you’ll get the quality of, “sleeping with your mouth open/the way the open mouth is pretty/on someone caught thinking/the nothing they are thinking/between their thoughts.” I don’t know, perhaps the latter is supposed to gain something from the downstairs line indents (which I can’t reproduce here), but then we’re elevating poems into successes completely dependent upon their spatial positioning, that fraudulent line of assertion from Olson and his many acolytes.
The back bio tells us that Mr. Harrison has been a creative writing instructor since 1995.
These poems are interminable. Length is relative. Most entries are only one to two full pages, but the narrative development is static, the details bland, the images disperse, the conclusions obvious. It all makes you pray the line-up in front of you starts moving again, or for the self-immersed rambler to catch the eye of a more promising sounding board. Three poems in, the reader is confronted by “Gone”, possibly the worst published poem I’ve read this century. It has a plethora of faults, including, but not limited to: bald prose (“When the groom’s mother died on the way to the wedding in San Diego,/it became a wedding from an American novel.”); cliches (“Everything fell into place”); ugly syntax and ugly common phrasing (“setting the whole thing up”); hysterical, false similes (“a song stuck in your head is/your mind reaching for poetry like a drowning mouth reaching for air”); and false spiritual wisdom combined with poor grammar (“you never know how beautiful air, or light, or life are until you must gasp.”).
There are brief passages of skill and verve here and there, lightning flashes that, even in their surprise, throw into dramatic relief the depth of the surrounding darkness: “She had looked for sweets/the colours of childhood comfort/and instead received bad-bread green and disinfectant yellow,/and a kind of teal that almost glowed/like a seabird in an oil spill.” from “Colour Code”. While waiting twelve poems till the next flash, you’ll get the quality of, “sleeping with your mouth open/the way the open mouth is pretty/on someone caught thinking/the nothing they are thinking/between their thoughts.” I don’t know, perhaps the latter is supposed to gain something from the downstairs line indents (which I can’t reproduce here), but then we’re elevating poems into successes completely dependent upon their spatial positioning, that fraudulent line of assertion from Olson and his many acolytes.
The back bio tells us that Mr. Harrison has been a creative writing instructor since 1995.
Friday, January 17, 2020
Robin Richardson's Sit How You Want
I suppose comparisons of Robin Richardson’s poems to those of Sharon Olds are inevitable. Both writers concentrate on the dance, denouements, and death of sex, but whereas Olds’ take on the subject is elemental, Richardson more frequently details desire and its fallout within relationships. In Sit How You Want, her latest collection, Richardson has thrown a welcome ingredient into the high boil of sexual strife: hard-won, terse, frequently acidic philosophical summations or epiphanies. “Eventuality” links natural and human-made disaster with the troubling aftermath of sex – “nukes/in North Korea aimed like loaded cocks. What offspring!” – but the concluding two lines bring the historical or speculative considerations back home: “Now we’re naked on the pullout, losing interest./We’re no better than the rest.” “Without a Roof” moves from extreme vulnerability (“open/on the operating table, so impeccably pink/pearl you could drape me on a hotel heiress”) to sexual distancing (“He disapproves:/the carefree sovereignty of solitude”) to transformative assertion (“There’s freedom/in what no one knows”).
Even in the short quotes above, Richardson’s heady lyrical scoring delights. She manages, deftly, the difficult trick of creating sustained music through quickly shifting tonal registers and narrative fractures.
More mature than her also excellent Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis, Sit How You Want is top shelf reading, contemporary as a power line, traditional as a post-coital Rothman’s. And nowhere in the volume does she succumb to the “fashionable cleverness in sex”, Dudley Fitts’ criticism of a topic most writers either approach with jokes, or avoid altogether like a neon-flashing landmine.
Even in the short quotes above, Richardson’s heady lyrical scoring delights. She manages, deftly, the difficult trick of creating sustained music through quickly shifting tonal registers and narrative fractures.
More mature than her also excellent Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis, Sit How You Want is top shelf reading, contemporary as a power line, traditional as a post-coital Rothman’s. And nowhere in the volume does she succumb to the “fashionable cleverness in sex”, Dudley Fitts’ criticism of a topic most writers either approach with jokes, or avoid altogether like a neon-flashing landmine.
Friday, January 10, 2020
David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night
Elsewhere I’ve noted that many of our elder poets resemble boxers who’ve stayed on for one (or more than one) fight too many. The poems keep on a-comin’, but their punches lack strength and accuracy. David Zieroth – a poet who’s written some charming, quirky fantasies and honest anecdotes encapsulating some fine and subtle spiritual dimensions in minute-to-minute mundane action – has recently put forth the bridge from day to night, and it’s a sad book to contemplate for its gloomy self-regard. This is especially troubling since the tone is set against the beauty of Vancouver’s North Shore, emphasizing the speaker’s uneasiness with chaos and mutability. This results in one of any poet’s great sins – retreat from engagement with the sensed world. Zieroth often shows his impatience with the outside world by avoiding it altogether, acting instead as caught fly in a weak cauchemar-web. “first thought” quickly devolves to “all of my thoughts” to “the many limbs of the forest” to “each day the thoughts erect a wall/and tell me not to look/back into the tangled garden”.
Five poems in a row, near the volume’s close, are particularly lugubrious. “grief” details, clinically, the emotion’s effect on the body: “muscles in our organs/draw away from contact with skin/and contract so blood drains/out of toes and fingers foreign/in the face of sorrow”. The language, here, is as dead as the bodily processes it describes. “grief” concludes with, “our wonderer worries that nothing/better might ever be”. I had the same thought about this collection at around page 21.
Five poems in a row, near the volume’s close, are particularly lugubrious. “grief” details, clinically, the emotion’s effect on the body: “muscles in our organs/draw away from contact with skin/and contract so blood drains/out of toes and fingers foreign/in the face of sorrow”. The language, here, is as dead as the bodily processes it describes. “grief” concludes with, “our wonderer worries that nothing/better might ever be”. I had the same thought about this collection at around page 21.
Monday, December 30, 2019
Best Books Read in 2019
Again, because of time constraints, I've limited the year-end review to specific parameters. Concentrating here on poetry and fiction, I've also excised rereads and books ranked 1-4 on a scale of 5, where 5 (all books here)is exceptional, 4 is very good, 3 is fair-to-middling, 2 is subpar, and 1 is irredeemable. Just including books from rank 4 (very good) would have ballooned the reviews to a number too big to take on.
1) Bernardo Atxaga, Nevada Days (tr. M.J. Costa), 2013. Categorized as a novel, Nevada Days is presented more accurately as a journalistic memoir with surrealistic interludes. Atxaga, with wife and two young daughters, and on a writer exchange in 2007-08 from home Basque country to the University of Reno, sets down an amazing array of adventures, Spanish reminiscences, phone conversations to and from his mother, Nevada histories, and geological explorations, all of them lively and strangely moving, while also maintaining a subdued, even accepting, tone in the face of (often) violent foreboding or remnant evidence. The lynchpin to the book is the rape and eventual murder of 19 year-old Brianna Denison in January 2008, the abduction situated catawampus from the Atxaga digs in Reno, but other highlights (if I can put it like that) include attending the optimistic auditorium carnivals (with frenetic retinue) of presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and (later) Hilary Clinton, the funeral (in deep woods) of an overseas Basque-American army soldier, the historical recounting of a heavyweight boxing match in 1931 between Paulino “the Basque Woodchopper” Uzcudun and Max Baer, poisonous spiders and snakes, encounters with state prison road crews, and a particularly frightening loss of bearings during Atxaga's drive through desert with his family. Costa's translation, as with many of her projects, brings colour, vividness, immediacy, and transparent thought to the fore without undue linguistic awkwardness. I've thought often of this book throughout the half-year since I read it, and themes, if you will, are many and interlocking: awe and non-judgement in the face of overwhelming cultural shock; asserting oneself into whatever experience is undertaken, but not as star or solipsistic focus; elemental bleakness, without the opposing sins of sentimentality and tragic hopelessness; loose ends that can never be satisfactorily tied together; and a relentless low-key tenacity in observation and diurnal confrontation.
2) Leslie Thomas, Dangerous Davies The Last Detective, 1976. I usually read about one crime novel a year, foregoing more because of the genre's limited engagement with character complexity, attention to writerly panache, and off-beat or meticulous description. My own take on plot is that it should only be the focus for the lowering of coffins, but I'm not your typical genre reader. Lately, though, I've been delighted with a new (to me) discovery: comic crime. I should have been more intuitive long ago, what with many comic movie adaptations of crime novels. Thomas' Dangerous Davies series of four begins with this book under review, and it nails so many elements, and with an astonishing ability, of what I look for in a 'literary' novel: individual vision; quirky, finely delineated, believable characters; moral complexity; descriptive prowess; emotional versatility; authoritative (and appropriate) information; lexical surprise (and general stylistic brilliance); and, yes, though it's not always needed, especially in those 'literary' works, an interesting and surprising plot. Davies is the 'last' detective because he takes on moribund (actually, buried) criminal cases that have gone 'unsolved' for decades. Somewhat of a physically maladroit Clouseau, Davies nevertheless proceeds with an underappreciated doggedness and guile, eventually (with the sometimes-help of his Babe-in-Arms bar room philosopher friend Mod) putting 2,418 and 654,774 together to solve the case. Steeped in Brit vernacular, and punctuated with the wit of black comic dialogue and situational physical highjinks (though with a touch more wistfulness than bite), the novel packs more 'meaning' into its wild yarn than a warehouse-filled remaindered stock of ponderous literary fare.
3) Patricia Beer, The Estuary, 1971. This slim poetry collection is a (pardon the pun) high-water mark for Beer, balanced skilfully between classical structures and interpersonal history. Marriage, severe illness, local history, house interiors – whatever the level of emotional charge, Beer creates a proportional art that avoids outsized declaration or obscure dullness. Rereading rewards one with layered ‘facts’, but also fresh perspectives without easy accusations, or even a sense that taking sides ultimately matters. Her imagery recalls Patrick Anderson’s approach of mating common nature word choices – rain, sun, shadow, grass – with unusual adjectival juxtapositions which act as both compliment and contrast. Classical allusions are expertly inserted into contemporary stories, sometimes dramatically, sometimes humourously.
4) John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 1981. The best novel of Updike’s tetralogy – more mature than Rabbit, Run, much more believable and less politically simple-minded than Rabbit Redux, and less cynical and fatalistic than the final Rabbit at Rest – received generally high acclaim when it came out, though now, like so much else earlier than ancient 2000, it’s been downgraded in certain academic quarters because of its perceived sexism and middle-class complacency. The last charge is hilarious when considering the ambiguously considered wife-swapping, the long and final (and brilliant) encounter with protagonist Angstrom’s first-ever fuck, and the many family decisions Angstrom makes in regards to the car dealership. The first charge misunderstands, in a sadly common recurrence, the difference between the author’s views and that of any of his character’s, and, even were he to be ‘guilty’, has little if anything to do with the aesthetic force of the work. And that the often “too much sex” charge is even given credence is itself puzzling. There’s too little sex in most novels, or, if a major factor, it’s often written as a craven or jejune or obfuscatory sandbagging exercise. Updike depicts sex, in many encounters, as joy, disappointment, lust, boredom, disgust, tenderness, and mortal reminder. You won’t get that kind of all-encompassing wisdom from sexual experience when it’s relegated to a ‘cleaned up’ academic room visited every hundredth page. Aside from sex, Updike’s other great themes are money and natural efflorescence and decay. For someone personally sheltered from many of life’s economic difficulties, his knowledge of money’s complexities – from many characters up and down the class ladder – is deep and on-the-ground convincing. Many reviewers and critics have lauded – rightly so – Updike’s facility and expertise with language. But they stop there. What makes it so? A large vocabulary is often cited as the, or a, chief reason. But Updike’s not so very different, in that regard, from many other excellent writers. He can write long, elegant, sinuously gorgeous sentences, but what really stands out is his stylistic virtuosity. Dialogue, descriptive passages, and philosophical musings are seamlessly interwoven without losing any narrative or meditative thrust. Nature metaphors are exceptional, often, as in classical or jazz music, with repetitive thematic material turned over like jewel light from different angles, or, to keep with the musical analogy, in tonal variations.
5) Shen Congwen, Border Town, (tr. J. Kinkley), 1932. This classic Chinese novel was banned during the Cultural Revolution. It’s unbelievable because Congwen’s focus is on the socialists’ supposed dream: manual labourers unencumbered by, and unconcerned with, intellectual concerns and counter-measures. A traditional story of two brothers competing for marriage to the daughter of a poor widower who operates a riverboat all day, the novel lacks even the undertones of political allegory or critique, instead steeping itself in the surrounding natural elements, those acting as metaphorical emotional forces in (mostly) the naïve and yearning young woman. A terrifically crafted and subdued tragic tone is maintained throughout, and if the ending lacks surprise, the climax matches the fatalistic cues and forebodings at every turn in the story.
6) Daniel Cowper, Grotesque Tenderness, 2019. (Reviewed for an upcoming issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters.)
7) Marjana Gaponenko, Who Was Martha?, (tr. A. Spencer), 2012. Another novel in a long line of exceptional European depictions of the guilt- and depression-ridden residues left behind after two, three, four generations of WWII experiences (Erpenbeck, Tokarczuk, Sebald). Unlike the other novelists mentioned, Gaponenko’s tone here is light (with pensive, even profoundly tragic, underpinnings), humorous, witty, farcical. It’s quite an achievement to make that complex tone register against the arthritic psychological backdrop of an old man having a determined adventure outside his formally steadfast mundane existence before cancer shoots its final tendrils into him.
8) Nicholas Bradley, Rain Shadow, 2018. (Reviewed in subTerrain issue #83.)
1) Bernardo Atxaga, Nevada Days (tr. M.J. Costa), 2013. Categorized as a novel, Nevada Days is presented more accurately as a journalistic memoir with surrealistic interludes. Atxaga, with wife and two young daughters, and on a writer exchange in 2007-08 from home Basque country to the University of Reno, sets down an amazing array of adventures, Spanish reminiscences, phone conversations to and from his mother, Nevada histories, and geological explorations, all of them lively and strangely moving, while also maintaining a subdued, even accepting, tone in the face of (often) violent foreboding or remnant evidence. The lynchpin to the book is the rape and eventual murder of 19 year-old Brianna Denison in January 2008, the abduction situated catawampus from the Atxaga digs in Reno, but other highlights (if I can put it like that) include attending the optimistic auditorium carnivals (with frenetic retinue) of presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and (later) Hilary Clinton, the funeral (in deep woods) of an overseas Basque-American army soldier, the historical recounting of a heavyweight boxing match in 1931 between Paulino “the Basque Woodchopper” Uzcudun and Max Baer, poisonous spiders and snakes, encounters with state prison road crews, and a particularly frightening loss of bearings during Atxaga's drive through desert with his family. Costa's translation, as with many of her projects, brings colour, vividness, immediacy, and transparent thought to the fore without undue linguistic awkwardness. I've thought often of this book throughout the half-year since I read it, and themes, if you will, are many and interlocking: awe and non-judgement in the face of overwhelming cultural shock; asserting oneself into whatever experience is undertaken, but not as star or solipsistic focus; elemental bleakness, without the opposing sins of sentimentality and tragic hopelessness; loose ends that can never be satisfactorily tied together; and a relentless low-key tenacity in observation and diurnal confrontation.
2) Leslie Thomas, Dangerous Davies The Last Detective, 1976. I usually read about one crime novel a year, foregoing more because of the genre's limited engagement with character complexity, attention to writerly panache, and off-beat or meticulous description. My own take on plot is that it should only be the focus for the lowering of coffins, but I'm not your typical genre reader. Lately, though, I've been delighted with a new (to me) discovery: comic crime. I should have been more intuitive long ago, what with many comic movie adaptations of crime novels. Thomas' Dangerous Davies series of four begins with this book under review, and it nails so many elements, and with an astonishing ability, of what I look for in a 'literary' novel: individual vision; quirky, finely delineated, believable characters; moral complexity; descriptive prowess; emotional versatility; authoritative (and appropriate) information; lexical surprise (and general stylistic brilliance); and, yes, though it's not always needed, especially in those 'literary' works, an interesting and surprising plot. Davies is the 'last' detective because he takes on moribund (actually, buried) criminal cases that have gone 'unsolved' for decades. Somewhat of a physically maladroit Clouseau, Davies nevertheless proceeds with an underappreciated doggedness and guile, eventually (with the sometimes-help of his Babe-in-Arms bar room philosopher friend Mod) putting 2,418 and 654,774 together to solve the case. Steeped in Brit vernacular, and punctuated with the wit of black comic dialogue and situational physical highjinks (though with a touch more wistfulness than bite), the novel packs more 'meaning' into its wild yarn than a warehouse-filled remaindered stock of ponderous literary fare.
3) Patricia Beer, The Estuary, 1971. This slim poetry collection is a (pardon the pun) high-water mark for Beer, balanced skilfully between classical structures and interpersonal history. Marriage, severe illness, local history, house interiors – whatever the level of emotional charge, Beer creates a proportional art that avoids outsized declaration or obscure dullness. Rereading rewards one with layered ‘facts’, but also fresh perspectives without easy accusations, or even a sense that taking sides ultimately matters. Her imagery recalls Patrick Anderson’s approach of mating common nature word choices – rain, sun, shadow, grass – with unusual adjectival juxtapositions which act as both compliment and contrast. Classical allusions are expertly inserted into contemporary stories, sometimes dramatically, sometimes humourously.
4) John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, 1981. The best novel of Updike’s tetralogy – more mature than Rabbit, Run, much more believable and less politically simple-minded than Rabbit Redux, and less cynical and fatalistic than the final Rabbit at Rest – received generally high acclaim when it came out, though now, like so much else earlier than ancient 2000, it’s been downgraded in certain academic quarters because of its perceived sexism and middle-class complacency. The last charge is hilarious when considering the ambiguously considered wife-swapping, the long and final (and brilliant) encounter with protagonist Angstrom’s first-ever fuck, and the many family decisions Angstrom makes in regards to the car dealership. The first charge misunderstands, in a sadly common recurrence, the difference between the author’s views and that of any of his character’s, and, even were he to be ‘guilty’, has little if anything to do with the aesthetic force of the work. And that the often “too much sex” charge is even given credence is itself puzzling. There’s too little sex in most novels, or, if a major factor, it’s often written as a craven or jejune or obfuscatory sandbagging exercise. Updike depicts sex, in many encounters, as joy, disappointment, lust, boredom, disgust, tenderness, and mortal reminder. You won’t get that kind of all-encompassing wisdom from sexual experience when it’s relegated to a ‘cleaned up’ academic room visited every hundredth page. Aside from sex, Updike’s other great themes are money and natural efflorescence and decay. For someone personally sheltered from many of life’s economic difficulties, his knowledge of money’s complexities – from many characters up and down the class ladder – is deep and on-the-ground convincing. Many reviewers and critics have lauded – rightly so – Updike’s facility and expertise with language. But they stop there. What makes it so? A large vocabulary is often cited as the, or a, chief reason. But Updike’s not so very different, in that regard, from many other excellent writers. He can write long, elegant, sinuously gorgeous sentences, but what really stands out is his stylistic virtuosity. Dialogue, descriptive passages, and philosophical musings are seamlessly interwoven without losing any narrative or meditative thrust. Nature metaphors are exceptional, often, as in classical or jazz music, with repetitive thematic material turned over like jewel light from different angles, or, to keep with the musical analogy, in tonal variations.
5) Shen Congwen, Border Town, (tr. J. Kinkley), 1932. This classic Chinese novel was banned during the Cultural Revolution. It’s unbelievable because Congwen’s focus is on the socialists’ supposed dream: manual labourers unencumbered by, and unconcerned with, intellectual concerns and counter-measures. A traditional story of two brothers competing for marriage to the daughter of a poor widower who operates a riverboat all day, the novel lacks even the undertones of political allegory or critique, instead steeping itself in the surrounding natural elements, those acting as metaphorical emotional forces in (mostly) the naïve and yearning young woman. A terrifically crafted and subdued tragic tone is maintained throughout, and if the ending lacks surprise, the climax matches the fatalistic cues and forebodings at every turn in the story.
6) Daniel Cowper, Grotesque Tenderness, 2019. (Reviewed for an upcoming issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters.)
7) Marjana Gaponenko, Who Was Martha?, (tr. A. Spencer), 2012. Another novel in a long line of exceptional European depictions of the guilt- and depression-ridden residues left behind after two, three, four generations of WWII experiences (Erpenbeck, Tokarczuk, Sebald). Unlike the other novelists mentioned, Gaponenko’s tone here is light (with pensive, even profoundly tragic, underpinnings), humorous, witty, farcical. It’s quite an achievement to make that complex tone register against the arthritic psychological backdrop of an old man having a determined adventure outside his formally steadfast mundane existence before cancer shoots its final tendrils into him.
8) Nicholas Bradley, Rain Shadow, 2018. (Reviewed in subTerrain issue #83.)
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