This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann

War Bird by David Gewanter

War Bird, David Gewanter (Phoenix Poets: the University of Chicago Press, 2009) (review originally published in Tikkun Magazine) (Buy it)

As a wounded Afghanistan veteran has it in an email home in David Gewanter’s poem, “American Incognito,” “As a state…/Afghanistan is next to Mars.” Where does the imagination live, and what are its politics? In “Hamlet of Merano: The Lotus Eaters,” Gewanter plays with the roles of tour guide and literary historian, knotting together a poem from strands of history and literature, but makes something new of the aggrandizing narcotic of the place itself. The reader can live in a verbal space greater than physical perception or emotional recognition, in the fires sparked by juxtaposition. A town in the Alps between Italy and Germany, Merano is not only a geographic border, but also a cultural and historical one. Gewanter’s poem is an extraordinary guide to a Merano not in any record, one that hides in imagination’s untouchable shadow, ideal and replete. Pound wrote part of The Cantos in Merano; Kafka went there as a cure for tuberculosis (“even Kafka, scowling like Bogart/came to Merano once, for the waters…”, a wondrous quoting of the film Casablanca, which captures the film’s droll irony, as Rick says to Captain Renault, “I came to Casablanca for the waters,” and Renault replies, “The waters? What waters? We're in the desert,” to which Rick replies, “I was misinformed.”)

In the poem’s present tense, undergrad tourists (“… the ox-eyed/girls of Appalachia College (study abroad)/stretch for the castle’s champagne grapes, /or play hacky sack in short-shorts…/O to be a grape underfoot–”) are subordinated to the history of the place. Gewanter summons the Lotus Easters of Homer, Herodotus, and Tennyson, and the mystical plant that Homer’s sailors eat, that kills their desire to return to the ship, and keeps them locked in their dreams: “The eye sees what it remembers,/the imagination dreams its rut/is fresh, not tragical-comical-historical…/Who, pocketing the chilly grapes, would not/name himself king here,/and forget who is king?

We’re used to reading political philosophy, history, and cultural objects as themselves first--that is, as definite “non-fiction” texts that revel in linearity and objectivity. Journalism lassoes a topic at best with a fine sprinkling of detail. Gewanter uses politics, history, and culture, but not objectively: he proclaims his poems; character or setting lead, and develop in tone from the set of a character’s mouth, the suggestive atmosphere or shape of a landscape. His diction and associations trip you up and force you back to chaotic juxtapositions built within, or by, sentences; his syntax creates a history of his imagination, which we read as an imagining of our history.

In “1972: The Battery,” the weather, adolescent political feelings and sexual maturation (“the battery hums along the leg”), conspire with the first hints of adult ennui in the American summer of the Cambodian incursion. Two high school boys, the “Billboard Bandits,” are electrocuted during one of their pranks, and their school becomes a battleground. When the bombing in Cambodia begins, the radical students want to leave the flag at half-mast, their private grief for the Billboard Bandits mutating into a public outcry over the political decision. At end, the hippies and the football players face off in an American political contest in miniature, over keeping the flag down in shame, or up high in pride.

“American Incognito,” a startling longer poem, unites wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed hospital, the discovery of the spine of a prehistoric beast found in Washington, DC in 1898, and a primer on breeding hawks. It’s an anguished political howling. A wounded vet who once burned poppies in Afghanistan now finds comfort and forgetfulness only in his morphine treatment (“gorked on pain relief cocktails”). And in the momentous year 2001 when the poem is set, the future that did happen wasn’t “monkeys talking” as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather, history stepped ahead all over our dreams for it, ridiculously (in the honoring of a Capitolosaurus dinosaur which never really was), politically (in the confused, negating tenure of George W. Bush), and tragically (in a chilling 9-11 reference to the moment “when Mohammed Atta decides he cannot date a waitress”). Soldiers patrol in a dust storm in Iraq, a scene crosscut with George W. Bush’s DUI and Laura Bush’s “vehicular manslaughter” conviction in high school (“the car found guilty”).

Gewanter shows great range to superb effect: from “Baudelaire’s Day Book (September, 1993: The Cauliflower)”--an imagistic prose-poem of a death-bed vigil--to “War Bird: A Journal,” a mad riffing on the 2003 poets’ anti-war rally at the White House, in response to Laura Bush’s politically-minded cancellation of a poetry “salon”. There there’s “Desaparecidos: The Unspeakable,” a playful poem about modern critical poetical thinking that is also a moving elegy for the silence real grief imposes, when language fails us.

The poems are funny, vicious and swirling, many politically motivated, their ironic language lobbying for connections between strata of meanings. How do politics and history and culture sound in the subjective, as something spoken by the poet who cares about the texture of language, the privileged placement of sound and sense, above a layer of “meaning?” Gewanter’s history feels personal, a history he creates consciously in the present, as a preparation for the future. We want some of our poems, at least, to be beyond knowing, larger than plot-driven, not necessarily lessons in how to feel or what to see, but voices we catch and chase, like a drowsy consciousness drifting toward sleep, suddenly sharply awake, enlightened or puzzled by possibility.

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

I'm reading All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones' second short story collection. It's good, depressing, dense, etc. The DC stuff amazes me, this whole rich novelistic life of the streets. He's got a particularly crushing line in the story "Root Worker" about my high school:

"Long before they reached 1st, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad. After 1st Street, she saw that many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief."

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The final installment, not out in America until May. I broke down and bought it from Amazon UK. Fully worthy part three, inconceivable to me that he could sustain it over three length novels. This one concerns a shadowy government organization, sort of intelligence-ish, that runs foreign spies who've sought asylum in Sweden. More soon. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't t fuck up the movies.

Winter's Bone

Daniel Woodrell sure can write a sentence. He manages, in Winter's Bone, not only to come up with a convincing, emotionally-taut plot, but his lean, beautiful prose makes the entire journey through the Ozark white-trash countryside a wonder. His protagonist, 16 year old Rees Dolly, searches for her missing father, who has defaulted on a jail bond, unwittingly putting the house at risk for repossession where Rees lives in with her demented mother and two younger brothers. Rees is a supergirl, taking care of her charges tenderly and completely, teaching her younger brothers to shoot a gun in the fear that they will need the skill much sooner than later. Her relatives, a sprawling, vicious, secretive and ancient Ozarks clan, threaten her, succor her, and ultimately confound her in her search.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

The Zero by Jess Walter

Best book about September 11 that I've seen so far.

I could not put it down, but still felt peckish and discerning as if
something in the narrative tension lessened along the way. The first half was very classic modern noir, sort of Jonathan Lethem, GUN WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC and the film MEMENTO, but the second half dissolved into Delillo-ish trumped-up profundities. I missed his partner's presence (he jumps back in at the very end, but I liked him a lot), and I just sort of auto- read after I realized that the plot was also, ultimately, going to be beyond the protagonist's grasp too.

The Believers by Zoe Heller

The People on Privilege Hill by Jane Gardham

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

I could not put it down, but still felt peckish and discerning as if
something in the narrative tension lessened along the way. The first half was very classic modern noir, sort of Jonathan Lethem, GUN WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC and the film MEMENTO, but the second half dissolved into Delillo-ish trumped-up profundities. I missed his partner's presence (he jumps back in at the very end, but I liked him a lot), and I just sort of auto- read after I realized that the plot was also, ultimately, going to be beyond the protagonist's grasp too.

The Prisoner tv series

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

it's crazy accessible and friendly and funny.
What gives with the guy? Last novel made me so very angry.

I’m halfway through and he’s still introducing new characters every page or so, it’s a pastiche of a satire of a crazy board game, but at least it’s finishable (he says, not finishing it just yet.)

it’s Pynchon-lite, for sure, but eminently get-through-able, which has never been his affliction. and the old-LA-nostalgia-ness of it rings true. Plus, it’s like the detailed novel THE BIG LEBOWSKI never came from – and reminded me of you through and through. it’s a pastiche of a cartoon of a satire of a board game – you constantly have to refer to the instructions the whole time through, just to know where you are – but still, it’s a dish, and he’s 72, so who knows what else he’ll write.

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

I’ve just finished Birds of America and Who Will Run, and would like to stand amended on my initial hesitation at Lorrie Moore's writing style.

The voice she uses everywhere in BoA is just extraordinary – I guess I’ve evolved from “who talks that way?” to “she talks that way and just sit back and wathc it work.” She’s outrageously funny to at almost all times – even her throwaway lines are burnished. “She didn’t mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland.” That’s from “Willing,” about the over-the-hill movie actress who moves back to Chicago from LA and starts dating an auto mechanic named Walt. “Which is More Than I Can Say about Some People” chronicles a trip to Ireland by a mother and daughter. The daughter’s marriage is failing, and she spends the vacation watching her elderly mother open up and try new things and show great signs of life.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

This much-ballyhooed new novel from Colm Toibin is another purely perfectly-pitched narrative, but it did not hit me nearly as hard as his earlier novels, particularly The Master, Toibin's channeling of Henry James in a ficitional omniscient memoir.

The good things are great: Toibin feels more and more to me like a more sensitive Hemingway, his sentences are transparently clean and there is not a trace of authorial voice intrusion. Everything in the books sounds exactly like something thought or said by one of the characters. He writes small, perfect sentences, and they build up incredible incremental pressure within characters, eventually delivering powerful change.

America via New York via Brooklyn is lovingly rendered, as a real place, already grown in many ways and still growing. The novel's protganist, a young woman named Eilisa, emigrates to America at the urging of her beautiful, vivacious older sister Rose and their widowed mother, who are both anxious to do for Eilis what they can't do for themselves: fundamentally change their lives. And Eilis, passive, quiet and aching to please, accepts the mission, sufffering a perilous crossing and a lonely first year in a rooming house in Brooklyn, working as a "floor worker" at a large department store.

Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien

A beautiful, succinct, witty, knowing condensation of a jam-packed (if brief) love-life and life of letters. O'Brien sounds like she knew Byron personally, she is so skilled at linking and narrating the history of his affections. It drove me to read a full-length biography of Byron, Fiona MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend, which is also tremendous. Byron's bisexuality, his affair with his half-sister, his courting and finagling of royalty and near-royalty, all burst from this lovely book.

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

Stick by Elmore Leonard

Continue to love every Elmore Leonard title I've ever read. (Full disclosure: not true. Have had Pagan Babies on the bench for ages, started it at least twice, can't get traction. Exception proving rule?) Stick is the latest, an earlier title, published in 1983. Leonard's prose is less dialogue-laden than the later novels, there is more scene description, more narration of the interior state of mind of the protagonist, Earnest "Stick" Stickley. The setting is familiar Florida: Miami, South Beach, Fort Lauderdale. Stickley is familiar too: just sprung from jail, a bank-robber (of course!), this time determined to work a different beat, a different grift.

That Old Cape Magic

I'm a scandal, it's true, but I was disappointed by the new novel That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. (I also was disappointed by his last one, Bridge of Sighs.) Is is judging a living master too harshly? If all his books were written, and I was just reading through the career, perhaps I would have liked it better, cut it more slack, thought it minor, but sharp anyway. Instead, because he is in the middle (well, late middle) of an illustrious career, I keep waiting for him to return to what I consider the peak of his writing: Empire Falls and Straight Man.

It's certainly not unenjoyable -- Russo can be hilarious, and he writes internal male anguish as well as anyone around today -- but I found the plot line boring, several of the lesser characters thin, several of the devices Russo employs (for most of the novel, he's carrying around either one or both of the urns containing his dead father and mother's ashes) too pat, too handy, too -- symbolic.

He weaves his several plot lines, as is his style, over half a century, juxtaposing and springing elusive memories on you just as he usually does -- with drama, in emotionally-certain movements.

The End of the West by Michael Dickman

Don't know why this book of poem's reminds me of Rilke's Duino Elegies, but will try to suss it out. Though the language is much more transparent (in Dickman), the velocity and vertigo are similar, the ache.

Dickman's landscape for his poems, as it were, is emotional: mostly he engages family and friends directly, addresses them, in a one-sided conversation that violently plucks and juxtaposes images from his tragic, if witty, wound of an imagination. Everything is lost, or being lost, or there are plans in the works for its loss.

The form is open field free verse, with wads of silent white space between lines and stanza. He relies on anaphora.

Nervous System

Make a list
of everything that's
ever been

on fire -

Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea

Your mother burned down to the skeleton

so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the
house again, exhausted
in slippers

What else?

Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs

*

Lisbeth Salander, Girl of Girls

If you've been living under a rock, and haven't either read about this author and these two novels (and the third, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, coming out 10/1 in Britain and 10/31 in the U.S.), I'm hear to preach to you, son, so hold out your hand and close your eyes and ask the ghost of Stieg Larsson to touch you and deliver his novels unto you.

Haven't been this enthralled by novels in forever. I’m addicted, it’s like mind-meth.

Will try to write about it , trying to figure out why there is something so exceptional abour his style, the clean white room of the Swedish speaking soul , the way all the characters seem to sound like emotionless Swedish detectives, the level of bureaucratic detail Larsson so effortlessly effects.