When the Author Builds Herself a World: Nicola Griffith, SHE IS HERE

Last July I mentioned Nicola Griffith, whose lush noir crime fiction can be a slow-read delight. At that point, her Aud Torvingen trilogy, featuring a Norwegian-born detective, was just being reissued, and is now easy to grab for American readers: The Blue Place; Stay; and Always.

Griffith is better known for her award-winning world-building in science fiction/speculative fiction. But she teases that you may not have heard of her books (especially if you're not reading sci-fi), but you've heard of the authors who praise herhis sleuthing series: Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Lee Child, Manda Scott, Francis Spufford, Laurie King, Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Elizabeth Hand, James Sallis and more.

So when the independent PM Press focused on Griffith in its "Outspoken Authors" series this winter, I set everything else aside to read SHE IS HERE, a slim compendium of Griffith's nonfiction, poetry, and short stories. It's not the most polished work I've picked up, but it's definitely compelling. 

As an example, in a "letter" to Hild, who ran an early Anglo-Saxon (Early Medieval) abbey and is better known as St. Hilda (protagonist of the award-winning novel Hild, pictured above), Griffith tells this historical personage brought to life that "On some level, you made me."

Of all the women remembered by history -- even sketchily -- you're the onlyu one I know of who lived on her own terms. Your renown was not as anyone's parent or wife, or for suffering unspeakable torment or a martyr's death. All you achieved was a person ion your own right. You lived a long and successful life and died admired and powerful. You won.

You won. That single fact, that women can win, helped counterbalance all the nonsense I'd absorbed from history. Partly because I stood on those ruins and saw what you had made, I knew we could each triumph on our own terms and in our own service.

When you notice that Griffiths describes herself on her website as a "queer cripple with a PhD," her self-discovery through Hild rings even more powerfully. And as a fictional world-builder, she clearly walks in company with such powerful writers as Margaret Atwood and J.R.R. Tolkein.

Give yourself a treat, a stretch, a vivid entry into the mind of an outstanding author. Grab a copy of SHE IS HERE. When you've finished reading it, maybe give it to the local library, for all the folks who otherwise might not notice an invitation into this potent adventure. 

 

 

Au Revoir but Not Goodbye, May 31, 2023

Dave and I took huge joy in creating Kingdom Books, first as a specialty bookshop (mysteries, poetry, Vermontiana) and then as a review blog. Dave's been gone four years, and I miss him all the time, but ... things must move forward, not back.

Effective today, since I'm reviewing at the New York Journal of Books and Historical Novels Review, I won't be posting more on this blog. But I'll leave it in place so you can search past reviews. 

As of 5:30 pm (Eastern), this blog racked up incredible numbers of page views (see below), and that's because of YOU. Thank you.

Beth

KINGDOM BOOKS Blog Stats, Page Views, as of May 31, 2023:

All Time 646759

Today 416

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This Month 8640

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Remarkable New Alaskan Crime Fiction from John Straley, SO FAR AND GOOD

It's been far from ordinary all along -- that is, John Straley's Alaskan crime fiction series featuring Cecil Younger, a not-quite-lawyer who at this point has served four years so far in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. That means he has roughly three more to go. And for a man who's worked in a form of law enforcement in the past, prison is a threatening environment. Even though he's there for murder.

Things could be worse. Cecil killed to protect his daughter, Blossom. Some prisoners sympathize. But a lot more are after him for various reasons, including money. He admits in his pencil-on-yellow-pad narrative, "Friend write me letters wanting to know how I survive in jail. I don't know why they don't come right out and ask me if I have come someone's bitch, which is what they both do and don't want to know."

With his next statement, "The fact is, I have become someone's bitch," Cecil's story breaks ways from conventional crime novel trails of the past, even of Straley's past (and he's never shied away from the depressing brutality of some Alaskan lives before this). Cecil's trying terribly hard to walk a line between "loving" a brutal gangster enough to get protected, and at the same time not getting raped.

Straley's a plain, direct storyteller who lays out both action and emotion without any fuss. So we get this from Cecil Younger, in his struggle to explain:

Until I came to prison, I enjoyed the privilege of being white and old. I'm almost sixty now, and I've been told by more-experienced convicts that I have "worried eyes" that make me an easy mark. I had been an investigator for the Public Defender Agency, which made me unpopular to a large portion of the population and a popular object of ridicule for some of the weakest minds inside the walls.

Remarkably, Fourth Street -- a drug dealer and pimp from the Lower 48 who's settled into the region, and now into the prison -- wants something that only Cecil seems likely to provide:

"I have a parole hearing coming up in twenty-four months. There are four white women sitting on the parole board. I want you to teach me how to speak respectfully to these bitches."

That leads into marvelous scenes of Cecil trying to teach both poetry and polite language to a very rough and powerful man. And trying to stay away from both Fourth Street's amorous hands, and Street's massive and emotional jealous lover. For a while, Cecil holds the tricky balance.

But it all collapses when his daughter's best friend, a girl nicknamed George, manages to get her own parents tagged as notorious kidnappers, Cecil's daughter Blossom plunges into both action and risk, and suddenly Cecil wants and needs more from Fourth Street. And it's going to cost him. Big.

The riotous mixture of misunderstandings, negotiations, escapes, and frankly amorous pressures and actions makes SO FAR AND GOOD a page-turner from the start. Moving this book onto the shelves of "classics" and "read this one again!" are the neatly nailed emotions and bargains struck throughout. Prepare to gasp in surprise, alternating with gasps of dismay and revelations of what love and kindness can make people do, versus those who've got neither. Oh yes, money matters, too.

No need to read Straley's other Cecil Younger Investigations before this one, as it's hands-down the best yet. But when the winter's getting under your skin and you want to remind yourself that it could be worse in, say, Alaska ... scoop up the other seven and have your own literary festival. No handguns allowed.

Just released by Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Disappeared or Dead? THE DEATHWATCH BEETLE (Ann Lindell 9) from Kjell Erickson

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“As more violence enters her tense investigation, and the inner madness of others takes on outer forms, how will Ann choose her own life themes? Does she need to remain lost, to stand aside from love?”

The Deathwatch Beetle is the ninth in Kjell Erickson’s Ann Lindell crime novels, and Lindell has actually left her job as a police inspector. But because she receives a tip that presumed-dead victim Cecilia Karlsson’s been seen alive, four years after the woman’s disappearance from the Swedish island of Gräsö, Ann steps back into investigating the cold case. Her motives are more mixed than that—she’s at a stage when she needs to sort out some things about herself—and maybe that’s a good way to walk among the personalities of this baffling set of crimes, open to emerging secrets and sorrow. And, incidentally, love.

Local consensus on the island is that Cecilia’s friend Casper died in the water, and Cecilia followed suit. When Ann decides to probe Cecilia’s death, she begins with a visit to the young woman’s parents—who are sure Cissi will come back some day—and then visits the men who’d once formed a circle of attention around Cecilia. When she starts with the area’s gossip, Robert, he tells her, “She’s dead. She took Casper’s death hard, unexpectedly hard, and followed him into the water. That’s the way you die here, if you choose to go voluntarily.”

But if she’s dead, why do the questions she left behind keep coming back to life? Ann identifies with disappearing—she did it herself, once—and the strand of her own life that keeps an unexpected life is the former investigator in her. She needs to solve Cecilia’s situation, in hopes of figuring out her own. “She could become a parish constable, move in with Edvard and live the rest of her life on the island. Daydreams, she understood that. The reality looked different.”

This is an elegantly written crime novel, with a sultry pace, translated as if it were high poetry, by Paul Norlen. Insects appear, mate, are eaten or vanish; the ticking of a deathwatch beetle invades the night in a half-hidden cabin; spiders and butterflies take center meaning in scenes. Slow layer by layer, with many shifts of viewpoint, the real story of Cecilia is laid bare—and it’s sordid and chilled.

Ann identified with this missing woman at the start of The Deathwatch Beetle. As more violence enters her tense investigation, and the inner madness of others takes on outer forms, how will Ann choose her own life themes? Does she need to remain lost, to stand aside from love?

Although The Deathwatch Beetle is far less gory than its characters’ souls seem to be, it frames a northern desperation that will feel familiar to readers of both Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum. The book can’t be rushed through; it demands attentive, focused reading.

Eriksson’s moody island of revelation is memorable, and as he did in his earlier award-winning novel, The Princess of Burundi, he paints murder here in layers that correspond to the shells and diversions of the soul. Perhaps we all long to be lost sometimes; will we agree, however, to be found?

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Local Book News: THINKING INSIDE THE BOX from Adrienne Raphel

No, this is not a mystery ... not even poetry ... but here in the Northeast Kingdom we're especially proud of our locally rooted authors, and that applies to Adrienne Raphel. So this is a heads up: Adrienne's long-awaited book probing the life of crossword puzzles and their fans launches on March 17, and with commerce in person getting pretty sluggish in this pandemic period, I bet it will be easy and fun to get this book online:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/561343/thinking-inside-the-box-by-adrienne-raphel

(And the other usual outlets, of course.)

Congrats to Adrienne and her family on another gem in print!

Diversion: Northeast Kingdom Poetry from Judith Janoo, January 2019

I just got word that Judith Janoo's very place-based poetry collection AFTER EFFECTS will be published in January, by Finishing Line Press. I wish I had it already, since there's an amazing poem on stacking wood in there, and this brisk weather has me thinking fondly of woodpiles past.

But more than the seasons and scents of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, Janoo's collection tenderly pulls open the sheathing around our family intimacies: how we live with each other and manage to still like and love, despite winter's incursions that shorten tempers, limit tolerance for "one more hard thing," keep us enclosed together more often than we may wish to be. Piling details in neat stacks, this poet paints a world -- one that is hers, but that we also may recognize is closely related to ours. Say, first cousins. Or step-siblings. Or neighbors.

I'll put just a taste of the woodpile poem here -- and you can already pre-order the book, in case you don't trust your memory to hold onto this all the way to January's deep snows.

From "Stacking Wood":

The first row on pallets for airflow,

coarse, split, no two wedges

the same, but fitted

between two rock maples,

bookends against the drop of light

and months ahead when

it feels like it’s all

coming down.

Smell of moss,

pepper, feel of leather,

splinters of sand.

Alone stacking bones

to last out the cold.

See the entire poem on this poet's website: http://judithjanoowriter.com

Diversion: Poetry Worth Reading More Than Once, from Jennifer Franklin

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Whether it’s God or fate or karma or randomness, how should we respond when life skewers us with loss and cruel reshaping of dreams into walking nightmares? Jennifer Franklin, whose award-winning poetry has appeared in an earlier full-length collection and in many literary magazines and who teaches this art, rips us out of complacency and away from the simple (if unjust) answers of Job, biblical deity, and bumper-sticker wisdom, to confront more than her daughter’s autism spectrum disorder—instead, she turns the blunt mirror onto her own emotions and choices, until the force of each poem ejects the mirror from the page, into the reader’s hands.

Under a title taken from a line of T. S. Eliot’s, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” Franklin recalls that Daisy in The Great Gatsby hoped her child would grow up to be “a beautiful little fool.” Watching her own daughter unable to take part in birthday rituals, Franklin declares:

All you read are songbooks and sing to yourself

out of tune. At least you’ll never believe in fairy tales
or blame me for walking out after each of us was betrayed.
. . .
It’s your birthday again. The few people who love you

celebrate but only the two of us know we have no cause.

It’s not enough for life to have given Franklin a speechless daughter. She’s also taken the price of loss of speech herself, in treatment for major illnesses that she never quite specifies (but can be perceived from her Facebook posts, if needed). Her wheel of challenges never ceases, and in “Waiting again for biopsy results in the second-floor exercise room,” she declares:

. . . I wish

I hadn’t been too self-conscious to learn
the basics of the Argentine tango in

the three lessons before the wedding
in Thessaloniki. Ever since I read

Brontë, I refuse to use an umbrella
and pretend I’m walking the moors even

in the city. I am never where I am.
If I told you what I look forward to,

I couldn’t bear your pity.

Torn between speechless times (one poem mentions a “trach scar”) and quandaries too intense to turn into word of mouth, Franklin carries the mythological along with the myth makers. She asks her mostly wordless daughter questions that won’t be answered: “Like if you feel sick // or if our ancestors invented cave painting / or song first. You never lie to me // because you do not speak.”
And what is the “no small gift” of the title? Hints arrive with the poem “Philomela considers forgiveness” (reminder: rape victim who in her revenge is transformed into a nightingale). Franklin offers, “He’ll / never admit what he has done, but / in the blue afternoon of regret, // I realize this is no small gift. / I need not wrestle with absolution / since he will never repent.”

With her layered images interspersed with near-playful admissions (“Still life with tongue cancer”—there’s a second way to read that), Franklin turns her journey of devastations into a multidimensional transit of human depth. If joy is to rise out of chaos and pain, there must be a composting process first, an effort of adding air and time. In “Amor Fati,” she marvels, “I didn’t / know these cuts would save // more than my body. / I wouldn’t negate any of it / now if I could.”
Far from the traditional confessional poetry of, say, Ann Sexton or John Berryman, Jennifer Franklin insists that the material of life, even the darkest, sharpest moments, be valued and named. Don’t give this poetry collection to someone in the midst of terrifying treatment for a deadly disease. Instead, purchase the copy for afterward, for the endless loop of recovery, fear, hope, and self-knowledge. In that sense: Recovery lasts a lifetime.

PS:  Looking for more reviews? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. Only interested in poetry? Try this link instead.

Eric Rickstad's New Crime Fiction (Vermont Suspense & Gothic) WHAT REMAINS OF HER

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Young professor Jonah Baum teaches transcendental poetry and Gothic literature at a small Vermont college. But nothing in his profession could prepare him for the November 1987 afternoon when, faced with an empty home and missing wife and daughter, he’d step into a horror narrative of his own.

With plenty of reason, and Jonah’s own doubts and confusion buttressing their assumptions, the police almost immediately began grilling him as the possible reason his family is missing. Did he chase them away? Or did he do something horrible to them? His alcohol-soggy mind can’t be fully certain of what’s going on and what he’s done.

Desperate for reassurance, and of course for his family, Jonah calls his best friend Maurice Welch, a local sheriff, for help finding Rebecca and Sally. To his shock, Maurice sees him as a possible suspect, keeps grilling him, pushing at details that Jonah’s twisted a bit to not look like what he really is—a man who’s afraid of his own incapacity, afraid of being left, afraid of any moment without the cushion of a drink and a white lie.

Those who’ve read Rickstad’s earlier books (Lie in Wait, The Silent Girls) know there will be darkness ahead. Some of it comes directly from Jonah’s weak-minded efforts to hide his inner culpability; some of it’s from Maurice’s determination to push, despite their friendship. And some of it is the dark, bloody illness of abuse and possible death pounding at the scene, forceful as a New England winter storm:

‘I hunted as a kid.’ Jonah nodded to Maurice. ‘He can attest to that.’

Maurice nodded, face grim.

‘And you just decided to take it up again on a whim?’ the detective said.

‘I don’t do much on whims,’ Jonah said.

‘Hmmm,’ the detective said.

Jonah’s every word, every action, seemed a mark against him. All of it suspicious. One of a thousand cuts. ‘I felt that old urge, and, frankly, free meat in the freezer never hurts with the cost of groceries these days.’

‘So you have money troubles?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

The detective scribbled a note. ‘And the head wound?’ He tapped his pen against his own forehead.

‘As I told Maurice, I got up too fast, lost my balance, and hit my head.’

‘And the dented wall in your daughter’s bedroom?’

 All the small things of life in an imperfect marriage, a restless career, line up to condemn Jonah. Maurice is unable to help—he’s there as the law more than as a best friend, it seems.

The real truth of what’s happened to Rebecca and Sally won’t be simple to find. WHAT REMAINS OF HER jumps forward into the adult life of little Sally’s used-to-be best friend, Lucinda Welch, the sheriff’s daughter. The small girls hadn’t understood much about their often scary world at the time of Sally’s disappearance, and Lucinda’s carrying a haunted burden of knowledge she couldn’t understand as a child, but recognized as full of threat.

Despite Rickstad’s reliance on ghostly tremors of unspoken, unrecognized evidence, this crime novel’s shattering conclusion arrives relentlessly and depends squarely on the reality of the long-lived circle of friends. Tightly plotted, jammed with frightening scenes of threat and loss, the book may haunt readers especially with the possibilities that what happens here might transfer to real life.

Which is, of course, the whole point of Gothic horror, embedded in crime fiction: to remind us of the fear and evil we half are drawn toward, half turn away from. Rickstad’s balance of this dark side with the counterpoint of courage and determination brought by now-adult Lucinda declares that truth may emerge, justice be measured out. Maybe.

Even this slim chance of righting the balance makes WHAT REMAINS OF HER a fiercely good read. Add it to the shelf of noir, along with Karin Fossum’s Scandinavian crime fiction, Stuart Neville’s violence-haunted Irish families, and Karin Slaughter’s twists on law enforcement and pursuit.

As always, for Rickstad’s Vermont books, don’t count on the geography matching the real Green Mountain state. Thank goodness, the crime’s won’t match, either—at least, not for today.

(Published by William Morrow.)

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Quirky Mystery Making a Science Point, ALDO by Betty Jean Craige

Black Opal Books, a small publisher with West Coast roots, is releasing ALDO in paperback on March 24. I've been mentioning the trend of university presses bringing out powerful mysteries, often literary ones or with a strong tie to the press location. In this twist, the light-reading mystery comes directly from a college professor, Dr. Betty Jean Craige -- who has written books in the fields of Spanish poetry, modern literature, history of ideas, politics, ecology, and art.

ALDO may amuse headline readers who'll recognize the tweeting President on the sidelines, and makes a point about universities defending freedom of research and speech. As a mystery, it's more an amateur effort, with sketched characters and heavy revelation of criminal intent. And I tend to resist novels that are making a point more than they are crafting a plot. That said, I enjoyed the book's portrayal of germline genetics research and its implications, and the author's effort to write from the point of view of a Latina immigrant. If those are your collecting interests, you may want a copy for the shelf.

Otherwise, I'd suggest sampling it as an ebook -- a quick read for a plane or train trip or a couple of hours with your feet up. Kudos to the professor-author for tackling university issues in her story.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Diversion: Poetry to Stretch the Mind, with a Smile ... Adrienne Raphel, WHAT WAS IT FOR

One of the delights of living in a rural place for a long, long time is seeing people make themselves into their dreams. When Adrienne Raphel left St. Johnsbury, Vermont, for all kinds of education in the big, mostly urban world out there, I wondered which of her dreams she would pick for the long haul. "We" all knew she'd be writing fine material -- but in what genre?

The question's now happily answered, as Raphel's first published book is a collection of poems, WHAT WAS IT FOR, via Rescue Press and the Black Box Poetry Prize.

The cover art, suggestive of an old-fashioned book of natural science, speaks to the sense in her poems that life-as-we-know-it has long-lasting themes and puzzles. But in her voice, these take fresh new form. I particularly enjoyed a surprising take on "vacationing" in the poem "Agar Agar," where the second stanza offers, "The sky is pink gelatin / Welcome to Vacation Island / the doorbell rings and I go / Close and leave my body behind." By the end of the poem, the hot sunshine's effect on that gelatin -- oh yes, I recall gelled "agar agar" in a Petri dish, ready to be inoculated with germplasm of life -- has transformed it:

I've never been so translucent never so runny
The white-hot sand makes my feet pinker
What part of me will I tattoo
I can go so far and farther

Many of the poems hint at a story line, then back away from it, leaving the conclusion and its emotional freight wide open. Questions initiate inquiry, like "But What Will We Do," which begins by asking"But what will we do when the rain doesn't come" -- a poem that entwines the I, we, and you of the moment into longer term questions.

It's a joy to have a copy of the book (a big thank-you to Raphel and her parents for the gift!) because I can return to it day after day and discover that other surprise of strong poems -- that in each day there's a different poem that seems to speak most directly. Today I listen particularly to the hints in "On Monday the Moon Sank Into the Sea," which includes "quixotic geese" and "slack-jaw old clams" as well as a "phantom leg left at a ball." It's playtime on Raphel's pages, and I'm happy to be invited.

Available from Rescue Press online, and also from the usual online sources -- and of course by order at independent booksellers. Tell them to get it into their shelf list, in case you hunger to go pick up another copy for a good friend.

Diversion: Eighth Collection of Poems from Leland Kinsey, GALVANIZED

Poetry month will arrive in a few more days, and with it, on April 8, the publication of the eighth collection of poems from Vermont writer Leland Kinsey. Nearly 400 pages thick, the volume is a treasure of rural life -- of place, and of family, as well as the traditional trades of farming and "going to the woods" for trees, lumber, solitude, and consolation. GALVANIZED speaks to the energy and nearly alchemical process of refining experience into story, and story into poem, as Lee continues to do.

The collection is a "New and Selected Poems," fronted with a baker's dozen of poems that haven't seen the press before. They are not all "just hatched" ... but maybe they have lain on the desk long enough to detach their sharp edges from this poet's heart, so that he can allow us to enter his grief for his sister Helen, for instance, in "Transit of Venus." These newly revealed tales-in-lines are also a bit looser in form and sound, a bit more clearly the stories themselves that press toward the light. Kinsey's kneading, pressing, and forming of the narratives engage us in the sharp turning points, the sudden awareness of a son who echoes one's own childhood, a longing for long-passed times and family members, a connection between what was then and what stands strongly now: as "Work and Song" announces, "substrate, intrusions, and bedrock / redolant with song."

Of equal and lasting delight are Kinsey's selections from his seven earlier books, and I felt as though I were milling in a crowd of old friends, marveling at how their early appearances had lingered in their lined faces full of character and choice. From the Barton, Vermont, poet's first book, Northern Almanac, I found the memorable and still shocking (in the sense that a young man is shocked by his first exposure to the grit and glory of sexuality) long poem "Fair Days." From Not One Man's Work is the poem "Galvanized," with an ending that satisfies me all over again, describing the "niter," the unpalatable residue from boiling maple sap for a season:

When young we tried it ourselves
dared each other to like it.
It had the sour and bitter taste
of the metals that make the world,
and, if attention was paid,
left for a second on the tongue
a thin sweet coating.

Here is also one of my favorites, "Fireflies," one of the many poems drenched heart-deep with Kinsey's emotions and connections to his father and his upbringing. (This is unquestionably a man's world for this poet, in a good sense, the way that Maxine Kumin's poems were and are always a woman's.) "My father's face glistens / in the milk house doorway / the first hot night in June."

I paged eagerly into the section from In the Rain Shadow, poems that follow this quintessential rural Vermont poet on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to a cousin working in Tanzania, where people call out "Kinsey!" and don't expect Leland to reply! I love the ties of one working landscape to another, half a world away, as with "In the Rain Shadow of Mount Meru," where the first stanza opens with "Young camels' groaning calls / carry to their mothers" and then nips toward "The least of the camels produce more milk / than an average cross-bred cow." Each new experience is lapped over the earlier ones, building a fresh sense of both the distant location and the meaning of home.

Three-quarters through, the collection crescendoes into poems from The Immigrant's Contract, a book I share with people who find poetry confusing in general -- but who may find themselves deeply connected to Kinsey's portrait of the landscape of the Nullhegan River's surroundings, where "the immigrant" logger proclaims: "Took years to cut this region over once. / This river drove us both ways, / into and out of life, and, shining dark-like, / just kept coming." And at last there are poems from the sweet and intense exploration of the wildlands remaining among us, Winter Ready, which Kinsey gave to us in 2014, spilling out "bottle gentian, asters, nettles" as well as "Moose paths, vole and lemming runs" -- the varied and specific abundance of the places best explored alone, a little bit lost, aching with both grief and beauty.

GALVANIZED captures why we live in the vulnerable places of the world, tasting and savoring and exploring. It captures the root word "love" in "loveliness," without speaking those names, but instead showing us through story, memory, and vivid complexity. Let this book simmer and thus perfume the days and evenings ahead. With Leland Kinsey, Green Writers Press of Brattleboro, Vermont, has brought us this fine and treasured gift.

Diversion, Poetry, FELICITY by Mary Oliver

[Did you notice that the New York Times filled most of its book review section yesterday with poetry??]

Life in New England collides with Robert Frost's poems so often. Stone walls, woods roads that fork, apple picking, running errands while talking to one's horse -- well, okay, not that last one so much. But almost. At any rate, it's intriguing to see which poets pin down the threads of life here in Vermont in ways that can't be forgotten. And I'm glad to extend that investigation to other parts of New England. (Beyond those borders, I'm no expert on the quality of match between terrain and poem.)

So I keep an eye on the works of Mary Oliver, Cape Cod poet par excellence (in recent years residing in Florida) and also poet of the heart, and of dog lovers everywhere. Turtle and frog lovers may also indulge.

Oliver's 2015 collection FELICITY -- oddly marked 2016 on the front of the title page -- is a sparse and thin volume with 81 numbered pages, many of which are blank or only bear a few lines. This may be helpful in absorbing the more philosophical poems, which tend to be also very short, verging on koan. One I enjoyed, called "Don't Worry," is four lines long, so this is half of the poem: "How many roads did St. Augustine follow / before he became St. Augustine?"

The first half of the collection has some of the nature/spirit conjunctions that make Oliver's work enthralling -- trees, swans, a storm --  but also rambles through light mystical observations, and I thought, "I've found more substance than this in her earlier collections."

But when I reached the last two sections of the collection, "Love" and "Felicity," I could hear the teasing and passion of this poet's voice much more clearly. And it was well worth the reading.

Vermont Diversion: Everyone's Mortal in WHAT'S THE STORY, Sydney Lea

Vermont sprouts poets even in the winter -- there is no closed season for their interactions with the landscape. But Sydney Lea, with a Pulitzer finalist among his list of collected poetry and essays, turns instead to interaction with neighbors and community, and WHAT'S THE STORY, his release this month via Green Writers Press, elevates the poetic reflection to astounding levels of love and awareness.

It's a risky direction: Sometimes the friends and relatives of writers aren't wild about being brought onto public pages. Lea dodges a bit of that risk by writing mostly here about people who've already died. This choice allows him to reflect and grieve, as he confronts his own aging -- not just a waning physical ability to climb mountains and loosen boulders, but the near-daily loss of friends and neighbors his age and older. Reflecting on the passing of a chair-building craftsman, Irv, dead at 82 while tilling the vegetable garden, Lea writes, "Irv's gone, and the earth keeps healing, not to be healed for now, maybe never. Probably never."

But he presses beyond the wound of loss to say, "How fine, that almost shy way the man would greet anyone he cared for, his smile barely perceptible, his ice-blue eyes cast down, his words hard to discern at first. Not that Irv was cold, only modest. He was what he was, irreplaceable among other things."

In WHAT'S THE STORY, Lea grapples to portray why each friend matters so much; he does it with precise yet rich descriptions of people and even of hunting dogs, as well as shared terrain. And that terrain is not just the ridges of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire; it's also the passionate country of jazz, so that these "reflections on a life grown long" involve Charlie Mingus, Muddy Waters, and more. When he writes in memory of Jack Myers, a poet friend, by first replaying his own college experience of Mingus's music, he then tastes the state of "Jack's not with us" like this:

His absence may account for the sound, which has nothing, really, to do with the intricate magic of that Mingus sextet I listened to, nor with any line or stanza from Jack's mournful, witty, brilliant poems, nor is it the cry of sea birds. If Wagner didn't drive me almost mad, or maybe because he does, I'd say that the chord was a dark Wagnerian one. It washes over me the way the surf does a rocky shore.

After nearly seventy of these short reflections -- most just two or three pages long, and each one threaded so precisely that it's half memoir, half prose poem, and three-quarters jazz improv in words -- I wanted to shout at the author: Stop worrying! We are all getting older! Enjoying your grandchildren, your remembered childhood, picking a cemetery plot -- what's so terrible about all that?

But that's exactly the point in what Syd Lea's done with these short, bladed, budding items: taken the terror of aging and proved its tender beauty. So I return to the first page, in the reflection titled "Whatever I May Say," and re-read: "Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle's low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends."

Read this one to savor the way friends matter, and love abides. Thanks, Syd, and Green Writers Pres.

Diversion: Poetry from Donald Revell, Tom Thompson

In the days of old, when I was in college, there was a profession called Computer Programmer -- which now is most commonly called Coder. At that same time, there was a mantra of how programming works, with the acronym GIGO: "garbage in, garbage out." The idea was, apply this in reverse and discover that if you want to have good output, you must write good code for it, and so on.

The same may apply to writing well: Read good work before trying to write good work. The rhythms and complexity build up in the ear and the soul. (Thinking about what I'm reading, of course, makes it work even better when I then think about what I'm writing.)

So I appreciated a diversion today into two engaging collections of poetry from Alice James Books. The first, the 2015 title from master poet Donald Revell, is DROUGHT-ADAPTED VINE. The old-fashioned blossom on the lovely cover misleads -- this is a collection that faces the power and terror of both life and death, in wonderfully tuned lines rich with imagery and narrative. Revell proves yet again that the heart of a good poem is the story it's telling ... framed in a well-chosen form and made vivid with haunted phrases that linger in the mind's ear. Revell even invites the reader to indulge:
 ... If I could turn

My head, I would see the heavy mourners
Holding coffee, stranded on the median,
In traffic. Lost to me now. Care to try?
One Chinese daughter. One imaginary boyfriend.
In the unfinished story, they live
Above a toy shop, one consummate lovely smile.

Tom Thompson's 2001 collection LIVE FEED, blurbed by Revell, catches some of Revell's forms, whether as a scaffold toward potency or as an homage to the leader. Thomson's storytelling also excels, with fresh new ground in a vibrant cityscape.

I will take the infant down
past the park to the sea -- where wakes dissolve
into moon's lead cage. That's our face,
love, buried in night's thighs.

Glad I picked these up today. Glad to share such good news, too.

"The mother of poetry is ..." : Patrick Donnelly

Launching the St. Johnsbury, Vermont, version of National Poetry Month today, Patrick Donnelly came from western Massachusetts to read from his three books and work in progress at St. Johnsbury Academy in the Fireside area at the library -- and the only empty seats were in the front row, with extra listeners

even leaning against walls and columns to absorb the conversation.

And conversation indeed it was, as the Smith College professor and director of the Poetry Conference at The Frost Place (in Franconia, NH) opened his life, his writing process, and the translated poetry that he and his spouse Stephen D. Miller continue to bring forth from the Japanese. Students and teachers asked questions that led deep into both writing and love of narrative, which this highly accessible poet shared generously.

One particular phrase that will stay with me, I know, was Donnelly's comment about the presence of opposing reactions within a single poem: "I tell my students," he said with a smile, "that ambivalence is the mother of poetry."

Looking for a signed book by this poet? We have one (click here; when it's gone, it's gone), or reward yourself by traveling to one of his readings or lectures and picking up the one that calls to you most vividly.

No Fooling: 35% Off Our ABE Listings, To April 28

It's not quite lilac blossom time here, but we salute April as the month of spring anyway, with a major sale for all our books (they are ALL listed on ABE, already discounted by 35% from their usual prices -- click here to search them).


We have signed mysteries in lovely condition ... unsigned classic mysteries at bargain prices ... still some poetry and literature and a bit of fine press work ... Browse the listings, or ask us about something in particular (kingdombks@gmail.com).

Diversion: The War Memoir That Tells It All -- MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, Brian Turner

Can we make it a military rule from now on, that every large group of soldiers include an embedded poet? Incognito, of course -- Brian Turner kept his poetry writing to himself while he led missions. It wouldn't have fit the persona that he needed to convey as a leader under fire.

But now, 11 years after "Sergeant T" departed with his men for the Iraqui desert, this highly trained observer and wordsmith gives us the reality of war. The exhilaration of enlisting into a (mostly) male experience that your older, battle-experienced relatives will now share with you. The joy of feeling competent, and the goofiness of being "boys" with girlie magazines, guns to shoot, silly secrets. And the horror of death -- including potentially your own.

Turner gives us the men as they prepare to invade a presumed insurgent's family home:

The drivers will fire up their engines and check their gauges. Across town, a small child kisses her father on his cheek. The soldiers inhale the harsh smoke, lean their heads back and exhale up toward the dead surface of the moon. And -- though they darken into silhouettes as the night draws on -- the soldiers brighten inside. They crackle in nerve and flame. The gas stations and Laundromats and unemployment lines and hardware stores of America disappear. For now, they are soldiers. They are giants standing over the model of someone else's life. Humming with adrenaline, they stand in the great sweep of history -- past, passing and yet to come -- and take it all in.

That's right, MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY is written in prose. The stories follow each other, rooted in daily life on base, in trucks, behind guns ... and even when Turner stacks the segments on top of each other, pushing the despair and craziness into a ladder to that darkening dead moon, he's telling stories.

Except every now and then, just the way he does right after this passage, he turns the words into something like a pounding drum, when he writes: "The soldiers enter the house, the soldiers enter the house."

There's immense love in here, as well as carefully chosen words and images that bring hard choices to life. In a way that only the return from, and processing of, Vietnam could allow, Turner also opens up the view of what it's like to "come home" -- carrying indelible memories of pain and risk and loss and fear, endless fear, from a battleground where a child or a gift can disguise a deadly threat.

I'm not, in general, a fan of war stories. But this potent braid of necessity, excitement, and guilt and grief -- this is worth reading more than once. This is what a poem that learns to be a long, long story becomes, and lingers. Grandfather, father, and soldier son -- and more.

If only it were a real rule: Tell the truth, the way a really fine poet must always strive for.

Oh yes, you can read this without knowing Brian Turner's war poetry. But I've been a fan of all his work -- poems, New York Times blog, more poems, and now this memoir. For some perspective, click here for more discussion of Brian Turner's writing.

Most of all, after reading MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: What story would you share if someone asked you what your war was like?

Louise Penny and Brome Lake Books, A Rare Partnership

Yesterday Dave and I drove eagerly north, across the border into Canada, for the pre-release book party for Louise Penny's new Armand Gamache investigation, A LONG WAY HOME. I'll write about the book later -- today I'll share some of the event instead, hosted in Louise Penny's home neighborhood by Danny McAuley and Lucy Hoblyn of Brome Lake Books.

There can't be many partnerships of author and local bookshop as close as the one that Louise and Danny and Lucy share. Louise tucks bits of description of the shop into her Three Pines books; Danny and Lucy provide a special section of their shop in honor of this author, complete with a pair of comfortable reading chairs and an inscribed book table, as well as the cozy wall decor shown here.

And the respect and intelligent understanding between Louise Penny and Danny McAuley was especially evident in yesterday's on-stage conversation, where Danny asked the questions and Louise provided thoughtful responses that kept us riveted. Here are some examples:

[Danny recalled listening on the radio on the day when Louise announced her departure from a 20-year career at CBC, the Canadian national radio broadcasting firm.] Louise, smiling: "I don't think it's a complete coincidence that I spent 20 years at CBC and went on to write about murder. I also think the more screwed up you are, the better writer you are -- again, the CBC came in handy." She then turned serious and spoke of the "amazing acts of forgiveness" that she also witnessed in that job.

[Danny probed her time and efforts with research.] "A lot of it is good luck, I have to say, or grace." But it also involves following chains of interesting information. For example, the mention of the "Balm in Gilead" in Penny's new book was originally based on her visceral reaction to a long prayer expressed by a father in Marilynne Robinson's literary novel Gilead. But then she heard the hymn "There Is a Balm in Gilead" chanted, and it moved her in a new way. "I heard it when I needed to hear it, and I made note of it." The results are in the pages.

[Danny noted the use of a Canadian artist's work for the book jacket and asked about her connections to art and her research in that area.] Penny immediately confessed that her own upbringing focused on books, not art -- which instead comes into her life through her husband Michael, who is both an artist and a well-educated art appreciator. She watches her husband look at art, and listens hard to how he speaks of what he sees. "And that's what I write about -- I write about the emotions that art invokes, not about art itself."

[Likewise, Penny borrows her cooking expertise through both book research and the people around her.] "I don't cook -- at all, as Michael will tell you -- but I love eating, and I love food." So she writes with cookbooks around her, as well as poetry. "I want the books to be sensuous."

[What about the wonderful way in which significant bits of earlier books in her series come up in later titles and turn out to be related to the underlying plot?] "There are bits in Still Life [the first Armand Gamache investigation] and others that don't come to fruition until much later." But it isn't always because Penny planned it that way -- she also goes back to earlier books looking for details that she notes with "Oh, I could use this!"

[Danny's pursuit of what lies under this newest book led to Louise's reflections:] "The Long Way Home is really inspired initially by Homer's The Odyssey." She went back to re-read it, contemplating "the hero's journey" in it, as well as in her own high school love for Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the newest book, Clara the artist persuades Gamache to help her try to find her missing husband Peter, and, says Penny, "the search for Peter is most of all the search for ourselves."

Many thanks to Danny, Lucy, and their team, as well as author Louise Penny, for an amazing afternoon. (Looking for a signed copy of the new book? Watch our ABE listings (link in right-hand column); Dave will be adding some this evening, and more on Monday and Tuesday, with the book's official release on August 26. Or, of course, you could treat yourself to a trip to Canada to visit Brome Lake Books -- where, Danny admits, lost wanderers sometimes arrive, looking for Penny's fictional town of Three Pines. They are pretty close together!)

Diversion: Poetry by David Kirby, A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS

It's National Poetry Month, and one of my theories is that a good poem can lift an author past any tedious touch of "writer's block" to a fresh outlook. Even for mysteries.

Floridian David Kirby makes this very clear in his new book via Hanging Loose Press, A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS. In long-lined swinging stanzas the narrative almost scoots past the presence of meter and line -- and then, swinging back the other way, Kirby's merriment restores the form and its rhythm, with a gurgle of delight.

I'll just give a quick sample from the poem "Fat Dope Dealers," third stanza down (in between two segments about Jefferson Davis, leader of the South in the Civil War!):

What makes dope dealers so fat? I know, it's because they
    can make thousands of dollars each week by making a few
phone calls rather than hundreds delivering stuff and throwing
       their backs out or mowing people's lawns only to have
them say "you missed a patch over there" and not tip you.

Think it's easy to pull this off for almost 90 pages? It's not easy at all. But it's wonderful, and funny, and fun, and thoughtful. I'm so glad this book arrived in the mail. It was a great surprise. And it's available now.

Diversion: Poets Discussed with Insight and Barbed Tongue

Tuesday April 1, in addition to being a guaranteed "weather" day here in Vermont (we have SO many "April Fools" snowstorms and rain items and more), is the start of National Poetry Month. I promise not to overdo this, but a little poetry is good for the soul and I think can enrich the life and words of mystery writers ... maybe even a few readers.

At any rate, if there were suddenly a murder case in the poetry world to solve, it could well involve Peter Stitt, whose collection of critical essays in THE PERFECT LIFE emerged last fall in a solid little book (166 pages) from Tupelo Press. I think I've read the first essay three times now -- called "In Love Begins Responsibility," it starts with poet James Wright and Professor Stitt (who is the founding and ongoing editor of The Gettyburg Review), moves on to John Berryman, and provides the ground for Stitt to talk about what it means for him to be a survivor of his own (long-ago) suicidal longing. The images and ideas are so strong that -- truly -- I used them a few days ago in a set of high school presentations. Know how highly the praise is, when a work of literary criticism engages a 16-year-old, or several peers of said teen? Yes, the essay is that good.

But there's more to come in this startling packet of tight and intriguing critiques. Whether it's disclosing the (probably immoral) editorial "making pretty" done to Emily Dickinson's poems, the similar messing around with Robert Frost's lines, or the justification -- or not! -- for fictionalizing fact and playing with dialogue instead of reporting it, Stitt keeps piling up edgy insights, remarks, and questions. I would love to have been a student in his classrooms -- and would also hate it, because you can't tell, at least from his printed pages, which parts are his opinions, which are meant as barbed dinner-table conversation, and which are "truths" that could be kept and nurtured.

As I read and re-read, I felt as though I was part of the table gathering on one of those edgy late-night shows, scrambling for something possibly witty to add to the discussion ... and although that's not necessarily comfy, it's exhilarating, exciting, and memorable. If you've wondered how to convince someone that poetry and poets are far from boring, giving them a copy of THE PERFECT LIFE would be a great start.

And it sets up a wry, delightful way to enter National Poetry Month: skeptical, eager, and hungry for more. And oh yes, suspicious that some literary bloodletting might follow!