Haiku, Hokku, Renga, Tanka, Haibun ... And Single Island Press

Four lovely books framed around the Japanese poem/prose forms have been released by Single Island Press of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Each invites long-term exploration, a passage into relationship with both meaning and shape.

The press itself emerged from this contrast of ancient and new poetic forms and from modern explorations of them:
Single Island Press was founded in 2006 by Madeleine Findlay to publish contemporary work inspired by the haiku masters Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Chiyo-ni. Today it is a multi-purpose facility serving the Portsmouth community and beyond.
It would take a persistent student of these forms to adequately explore the four books. Since I'm rarely involved with them -- a bit of correspondence with Cid Corman and a liking for David Budbill's poems have encouraged me to appreciate brevity, but I am limited to saying "I like what I've read" -- I'll give a simple description of each of the four books as I see them. The press descriptions are at www.haikumuse.com.

The first book offered by Single Island (the press name comes from a poem by Bashō) is SHAPED WATER: A HAIKU YEAR by Madeleine Findlay. A spare and serene format -- the book fits neatly into the hand, and each page contains one nature-bound poem placed carefully amid ample "white space" -- the collection lends itself to gradual reading, a page here, another there. Don't try to count syllables; look instead for the "cut" word of each poem, parallel to the volta of a sonnet, the turning place that links two segments into a comparison or a gesture. Here's a poem from near the center of the book of unnumbered pages:

branch low
over the worn trail
how many know you?

Many of the poems hint at a fragility of moments and of life itself.

Single Island offers another Findlay volume: EMPTY BOATHOUSE, ADIRONDACK HAIKU. Again the collection extends over the passage of a year, but this time there are graphics, especially tender and moody images of earlier times: women in graceful Victorian garb, boats, old pine trees, quiet lakes, and an occasional teasing view of men and families as well. The words here play against a sense of place-bound history. This volume is larger, about six by eight inches, and elegantly laid out. A sense of haiku as combined of mountains and rivers adds to its impact.

Haiku is a relatively modern form, an expression of the older hokku. Bashō combined the poem with prose. In Raymond Oliver's hands, the short poem undergoes another metamorphosis, into "triads": a pair of longer lines separated by a shorter one. The triads in RAYMOND OLIVER HIS BOOK OF HOURS also bear titles, each initiated by an ornate displayed capital letter (hinting at the sense of an illustrated manuscript, despite the book's black-ink-on-ivory format. I like especially "Sacramento Valley. Summer":

AUREATE peach and blue of mellow dusk!
Fit lid for such a platter,
Whose fruit is no less fragrant than its dust.

Tom D'Evelyn's ACCIDENTAL PILGRIM is the only narrative volume among these four offerings. Designed in an intriguing accordion-folded sequence of pages, the book is a single poem with roughly page-length portions, each ending with a three-line haiku-type stanza that savors the contrast of ancient Rome and the current city with all its history and personages. The title is drawn from a part of the third segment of narrative: "Sometimes a tourist becomes an / accidental pilgrim, catches a view of / the making of his soul." I found the combinations delicious, and paused several times to read more about the topics and individuals, such as Margaret Fuller and the Trastevere.

I think the ultimate summer indulgence would be the purchase of all four of these (directly from the press web site) and carrying them around from hammock to beach to shady solitudes, until a decision of which ones to keep and which ones to give to dear friends coalesces. Why not?

Madness and Murder: Philip Baruth, THE BROTHERS BOSWELL

Rarely do authors range as widely from book to book as Vermont author Philip Baruth. From an almost unknown fantasia that celebrates The Grateful Dead, to the evocative novel-in-stories "Dream of the White Village," to "The X President," there are few similarities other than a driving sense of narrative and passionate description.

Last month, Soho Press released THE BROTHERS BOSWELL, Baruth's first historical thriller. The novel is laid out in parts -- of which the first three, narrated by John Boswell, report John's determined pursuit of his brother James and James's patron, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Johnson, of course, is shaped on the historical personage known as "Dictionary Johnson," who took the literary world by storm in England's late 1700s. And James Boswell was his devoted attendant, describing his social world as well as his admired friend in "The Life of Johnson." The book became known as "Boswell's Life [of Johnson]" and marked out new turf in social documentary.

Baruth took a small mention of James Boswell's brother John and allowed a personage to grow from this sidewalk crevice of literary history. In this relentlessly paced thriller, John Boswell has recently been released from an insane asylum and is stalking the two men most important to him. Is he mad? Or was he unfairly detained in some vile plot of family and friends?

Abruptly, in part four of the volume, narrative shifts to a third-person form that centers on James Boswell instead; then the brothers' voices take alternating segments as the chase accelerates and potential murder comes closer.

The shifts act like a magician's sleight of hand, taking the focus away from the bold painting of another era that Baruth does to create the background and the characters. And the journaling and narrations become books within books, nested Russian dolls of information. Here's a snippet:

... what sours the joke is what I see as I descend the long line of stone stairs: a small crowd of people, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, grouped around the gray granite well, which looks like an eight-foot sentry box but for the fact that it has no windows. The vessels these people have brought are spread out over the cobblestones in a long, ragged, snaking line.

It is mostly women, maid-servants and caddies and fishwives, and the men are mostly boys a good deal younger than myself. The few grown men are on the oldish side, smoking pipes or seated in the windbreak where the stairs empty out into the Cowgate.

Most of the crowd stands together in small knots of talk, only their casks and buckets holding their places in line. Some turn their faces to look up as I draw nearer, but they turn immediately away as the suit works its magic.

The scene is an ordinary one in the life of the city where the brothers Boswell reside, but James is about to lose all ordinariness of his own. He states, "I've been making my first fumbling attempts to reconcile love and affection with lust and rejection."

Deftly, Baruth tangles the curtain ropes of the stage, until madness seems to underlie reality itself, and what has been most certain becomes a dream -- until a clue again suggests that this too is imaginary.

I know, I sound bewildered. In some ways, I am -- the narration, the twists, the loves and lusts of the three men in the tale are Shakespearean in their costumes and changing voices.

So if you love a good Shakespearean drama, this novel is likely to suit you admirably. Madness and murder: ah yes, Macbeth. Think of the power of that one. Baruth's presentation is drawn from the same well.

SMALL CRIMES: Dave Zeltserman's Creepy, Scary, Twisted, Devious, and All Too Believable Crime Fiction

One of the things the local English teachers work very hard to get across to the students is that just because the "voice" of the novel, or poem, says something happened or is true or feels a certain way does not mean that the author feels the same way. As we get close to our visit from Dave Zeltserman -- he'll be at Kingdom Books on Thursday June 25, at 7 p.m. -- I keep reminding myself that he's a nice guy. Just because he can imagine and WRITE like this doesn't mean his world is that twisted.

It's a good thing to remembers. Because in SMALL CRIMES, Zeltserman's 2008 crime novel (published in Britain but now available in the US), every scrap of self-justifying evil that could possibly take root is growing. Fast.

The book opens with a hopeful scene: Our narrator Joe Denton, once a cop, is about to leave prison. He's apologetic for his crimes; he plays checkers with the warden; his years locked up for arson, attempted murder, and maiming a district attorney seem to have cleaned him and made him fit for civilization.

The thing is, Joe never did anything with full intent to create damage and destruction. Things just seemed to happen to him. And now, released to live with his parents (who are reluctant to have him home) and accosted by a pretty girl who seems to get off on his having once been "bad," it looks as though life is about to give him a soft, sweet time under parole and probation.

Ha.

Once the pretty young woman's motive comes clear, so do Joe's habits. One small action after another, sometimes with really really good motives, he's going down. Oh, so far down. Let me know if you recognize anybody you know, as you keep reading. Frankly, I couldn't put the book down, even though my stomach clenched, my head started to ache, and I started thinking about going to a self-help group, fast.

Here's a sample from around the middle of the book:

He was breathing heavily, his breath stale and oppressive, a bit like rotting garbage. I had to force myself to keep from stepping away from him. Then the moment passed. His eyes came back to life and his smile loosened into something more recognizable. He shook his head as if to indicate that I was nuts, and then sat back in the chair and crossed his legs. ... "So, Joe, how are you going to take care of this?"

As I looked at him I knew he meant what he said. He casually took his revolver out of its holster and rested it on his knee. I knew I was a breath away from being a dead man.

Fellow crime writer Ken Bruen called this novel "pure magic of the blackest kind," and Ed Gorman, longtime editor and reviewer, labeled it "one of the finest dark suspense novels I've read in the past few years."

I can tell I'll be reading it again, to try to figure out how on earth Zeltserman DOES this. But it's not a one-shot skill -- with three other top-notch noir novels already in print, six releases under contract for the next two years, a film option, and more, Zeltserman obviously knows what he's doing. Come meet him at Kingdom Books. We'll serve strawberry shortcake and keep the lights on. Seating is limited and so are the copies of the books (this one, plus BAD THOUGHTS and PARIAH), so let us know if you're coming: dknel@charter.net or 802-751-8374. And if you just can't get to northeastern Vermont for this one, but would like a signed copy of one or more of Zeltserman's books, let us know that, too, along with how you'd like yours inscribed.

When Detective Fiction Author Henry Chang Took Part at the Soho Crime Panel Last Week ...

I won't write a lot today about Henry Chang and his Jack Yu investigative series, set in New York's Chinatown and redolent of spice, threat, and complex cultures -- but that's only because I just wrote about his second book, YEAR OF THE DOG. Chang just nailed his first film option, with an independent film company that convinced him it would be able to sail well beyond the Charlie Chan image of Chinese detectives, to reach the dark reality of what he's writing.

Chang grew up in Chinatown in a bicultural environment, "So I can present these stories is a way that's familiar AND exotic." He added, "I'm kind of like the town guide that's gonna take you into the underbelly, and I'm having fun doing it."

With a past career that's included some forms of security work, Chang has the credentials to write vividly of the confusion and strain of police work. He's known his share of the crime association folks who people his books, too; but the stories take place almost 15 years ago, and he admits that most of the people who inspire his characters have long since settled into late middle age and quiet lives. (He's had one of them pat him on the arm and say "Hey, ya did good!")

"Outsiders are amazed by what they read in the book; insiders [today] don't go to the gambling houses et cetera" that house the tense action of Chang's Chinatown, he says. Bu there's one special way in which he connects his characters with his readers: through food. Everyone has a favorite Chinese dish, he believes, and he mentions many of them, along with foods that non-Chinatown folks will have to just imagine (and drool over) because they don't appear on the menu with General Tso's Chicken.

An active parent whose writing schedule has to allow for picking up his child from school (or taking out the trash), Chang writes in longhand, three or four pages at a time, at whatever time of day he can grab. He usually does thirty to forty pages before starting to type up the material -- at which point he's already editing his pages as he transfers them to the computer. His third book, with a first-draft deadline of July, was about 75 percent done when he arrived in the Boston area last week, but with a schedule that includes a BEA (Book Expo America) appearance and much more, he'll need every minute and all of the exhilaration of that last stretch to get it all onto paper in time.

Are Chang's neighbors worried that he's writing about them in his Jack Yu series? "Most of what I've written about Chinatown is 10 percent real. The neighborhood people are really just cheering me on." Some are shocked that he's translated their curse words into English, he admits wryly. "Nobody's chasing me down the street for my autograph, but it has got me a kind of notoriety -- more waiters (in the neighborhood) know that I write!"

"Tuesday; An Art Project" -- Lives On!

When art, photography, and poetry merge into a single project and a nifty packet of all the the above gets issued, it's understandable to wonder whether there will ever be another volume ... so I'm exhilarated to note that TUESDAY; AN ART PROJECT just completed its fifth issue (there are two issues per year), and is now offering two-year subscriptions.

Brainchild of Jennifer S. Flescher, who's the editor (Advisory board: Ralph Angel, Jennifer Arin, Sophie Cabot Black, Teresa Cader, Greg Delanty, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cate Marvin, David Rivard, Ravi Shankar, Don Share, A. J. Verdelle -- this should be ringing glad bells for many!), this is a "journal" that comes wrapped in its own intricately folded sheet that serves as table of contents and statement of the issue. The inside sheets (mostly letterpress work from DWRI) are independent, unbound, except for a neatly printed "belly band" around the four-by-six-inch printed gems. Poems, photographs, and prints follow no particular order. In the spring 2009 issue, Mary Ruefle provides "Poem Written Before I Was Born," which offers a taste of summer, along with Ruefle's vaunted ability to surprise as she braids fruit, incarnation, and individual choice. Its central passage is "In the month of July / in the middle of the month / in hte middle of the day / in the month of that hour / I enter the nectarine world."

A translation and several other poems follow, including one by Terese Svoboda ("The Widow's Walk"); then at the center of this issue there's a set of five photographs by Dark Room Collective poet Thomas Sayers Ellis (other poems and prints follow these, including some remarkable material by Joshua Blake Edwards). Ellis provides a statement:

Images are constantly worrying the world to allow them to become permanent. The photographer, sensing this, attempts to meet an unborn motion or stillness at its birth-moment. There's nothing sacred or instinctive about the process. The craft is interaction, a difficult interactive anonymity. The problem is being a body, forgetting that you are a body, so that the unborn photo will not fear becoming fixed. History does not exist without photography. It occurred before cinema and poetry. The photograph is purer than memory. The eye (not the mind) makes it so.

OK, I'm not going to try to take that apart. But if it appeals to you -- along with the intricacy of a packet of poems and prints and photos -- you might consider subscribing. It's $25 for a two-issue year -- see www.Tuesdayjournal.org or write to Tuesday; An Art Project, PO Box 1074, Arlington, MA 02474.

Soho Crime Fest 2: Cara Black Brings Paris (and Aimée Leduc!) With Her

Dave and I love what Soho Crime has done for the international mystery scene: publishing series by authors who live or write from experience of international cultures. Meeting four of the Soho authors at once last week -- well, we couldn't pass it up, even though it called for a lot of driving.

Actually, we'd already met James Benn briefly at Kate's Mysteries (Cambridge, Mass.) last December. Trim, elegant, the exact opposite of the cartoon version of a librarian (his "day job"), Jim ensured that the panel of authors could relax and enjoy the questions, conversation, and capacity crowd. (I'll offer a longer piece on James Benn's novels later in the month; I've enjoyed them enormously.)

We'd seen photos of Garry Disher (Australia) and Henry Chang (New York's Chinatown) that matched pretty closely the authors as they strolled in. Reading all of Disher's Inspector Hal Challis investigations has been a huge treat; watching Henry Chang's career expand from his debut with CHINATOWN BEAT to last fall's YEAR OF THE DOG is a pleasure, and we shared the excitement as he told us he was about three-quarters done with the first draft of "book three."

So Cara Black, creator of Aimée Leduc in an award-winning series of Paris mysteries, was the author we were most curious to meet in person. How French would she look? What kind of accent would she have?

Coming in through the back door of Stellina's (a smashing Italian restaurant in Watertown, Mass.), Black instantly brought that sense of Paris into the room. If those weren't French jeans she was wearing, I'll eat my page -- and Dave instantly fastened his gaze on her French sailor's scarf in bold stripes of black and white. And yes, when she speaks, even though she lives in California, her voice has the lilt and gentle hesitations of someone to whom French is a second linguistic home.

"I think Paris chose me," Black reflected. "I grew up in a Francophile family where food and discussion over dinner was very important." In the 1970s when she first went to Paris, she got the sense of a collection of villages -- "not the Paris of the berets and the baguettes," she quipped, and not Hemingway's Moveable Feast (which of course she's read). But 20 neighborhoods that saw themselves as complete and particular. "I'm trying to find the flavor and the uniqueness of each part of Paris." And in each one, she's placing a mystery. So far, that's:

Murder in the Marais (1998)
Murder in Belleville (2000)
Murder in the Sentier (2002)
Murder in the Bastille (2003)
Murder in Clichy (2004)
Murder in Montmartre (2005)
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (2007)
Murder in the Rue de Paradis (2008)
Murder in the Latin Quarter (2009)

For each one, Black travels again to Paris (often bunking on a friend's couch) and re-immerses herself in the feel of the neighborhood, while working out the plot. She does much of her writing in Paris too, but also in California, where she carries the scenes with her -- images on the wall, maps, more. Getting up in the morning, she writes, and she commented that if she doesn't check her e-mail, she gets a lot done! She said, "Once I've got to page 100, I've got my place [Paris neighborhood], and then I timeline it and I finish it and then I rewrite."

One plus of listening to Black within the multiple-author event was the range of questions people asked, especially those who know this author well. Prompted by someone excitedly asking her to retell it, she revealed how her research led her to firing a gun with the Delta Force in Paris. Wow! Here's a link to that story in her own words.

Most of all, I enjoyed hearing Black talk about Aimée Leduc and how the series is shaped around this computer security pro turned accidental detective. "Aimée is flawed, vulnerable," Black explains. "It makes a better story that way." And, she finds, this sets Aimée into the great tradition of the "lone detective."

Of course, the effect can be a bit different on the other authors: After listening to how pleased Cara Black is that she has a framework of Paris locales that promises 20 Leduc detective novels (based on those 20 "villages" of the city), Henry Chang suddenly suggested, "I'll have to go to each of the fifty or sixty Chinatowns throughout the world!"

More on Henry Chang and his writing, later this week.

Calendar Alert: Poets in Shelburne Falls, Mass., Thursday June 4

Lea Banks sent word of this reading, part of the Collected Poets Series that she's promoting in Shelburne Falls, Mass. -- one of the loveliest towns to visit. Might make a nice combination with the Ossmann reading earlier that day in White River; allow 90 minutes travel from one to the other:

Thursday, June 4, at 7:30 p.m., The Collected Poets Series features the poetry of Massachusetts' current Poet Laureates, Lesléa Newman of Northampton and Gertrude Halstead of Worcester. Eve Rifkah will be reading Ms. Halstead's work in Halstead's absence at Mocha Maya's, 47 Bridge St., Shelburne Falls, MA. 413-624-6292. Suggested donation $2 - $5.

For more about the readings, don't forget to see www.collectedpoets.com .

Lesléa Newman is the author of 57 books for adults and children including her latest poetry collection, Nobody's Mother, the latest novel, The Reluctant Daughter; and the children's books, such as The Boy Who Cried Fabulous, and Heather Has Two Mommies. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award finalists. Currently, she is the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA

Gertrude Halstead was born in Germany in 1916. She escaped to France where during the war she was interned in the south of France. She volunteered to work as an interpreter and subsequently was allowed to be released. Halstead eventually made it to Portugal where she was able to get passage on the last ship leaving for the United States. She is a member of John Hodgen’s writing workshop. Halstead's work has appeared in Sahara, Diner VOX, Amoskeag , Nimrod, and Columbia Poetry Review. Her first collection is memories like burrs, ( Adastra Press, 2006). She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Eve Rifkah was founding editor of the literary journal Diner and co-founder of Poetry Oasis, Inc. Her first chapbook is At the Leprosarium. Her book Dear Suzanne is forthcoming from Word Tech and a second book, Outcasts is forthcoming from Little Pear Press.

Poetry Events Reminder: June 1, Eamon Grennan; June 4, April Ossmann; July 1, Kingdom Books!

Scroll down for the Eamon Grennan info; and we posted April Ossmann's event a month ago, so click here for details.

We've got both Dave Zeltserman and Eliot Pattison coming this summer to talk about mysteries, so we've decided we need to balance topics by throwing a POETRY OPEN HOUSE here at Kingdom Books on Wednesday July 1, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. -- a great day to come to the area, because in the evening, Donald Hall is reading in St. Johnsbury, a mere five miles away from us. Our poetry room is bursting with new work as well as classics, and a lot of gorgeous poetry broadsides that we're eager to share.

Extra Helping of North Country Poetry

Thanks to poet Laura Davies Foley, we recently discovered the Upper Valley Poetry blog, "creatively chronicling the Vermont & New Hampshire Poetry Scene." Recent posts have included Laurie Scheck, Susanne Dubroff, Allen Ginsburg, and more. Check it out: http://uppervalleypoetry.blogspot.com.

A Mysterious Moment in the Life of Noir/Crime Author Dave Zeltserman

Life serves you luck at unpredictable moments -- and one of our best was when "my" Dave connected with author Dave Zeltserman on the edge of Boston a few months ago. Finding copies of this author's stuff wasn't easy, as it's come out either in low quantity or in Britain. But from the first page of each book, we were hooked. Dark, twisted, and utterly individual, Zeltserman's novels kept us up reading to ridiculous hours of the night. It's fantastic that this author is coming up to Kingdom Books in just a few weeks: He'll be here THURSDAY JUNE 25 at 7 p.m. to talk about his books, and we'll provide strawberry shortcake to celebrate the occasion. (With novels so abnormal, something normal like ordinary food has to keep us anchored, we figure!)

For collectors who love to get in on books just before their value leaps sky high, this is going to be quite a night. Here's why, as explained by Zeltserman on his own blog:

All of a sudden I've got a bunch of books coming out--6 in total over the next 2 years, and with some luck maybe a couple more (although those would have to be with pseudonyms). Here's a quick rundown:

Pariah (Oct. 09, Serpent's Tail)--This is the second of my loosely themed "man out of prison" crime noir novels, and probably the one I'm most excited about. It's definitely the most explosive book I've written, as well as the most subversive.

Bad Karma (Oct. 09, Five Star)--Sequel to Bad Thoughts, although instead of being the grim and weird mix of horror and crime that Bad Thoughts was, this one is a hardboiled PI set in Boulder, Colorado, with some quirky new age aspects to it.

Killer (Jan. 10 (UK), Serpent's Tail)--The third of my "man out of prison" crime noir novels. Existential noir.

28 Minutes (July 10 (UK), Serpent's Tail)--My bank heist thriller that's been optioned to Impact Pictures and Constantin Film Development. The US publisher for this one is still being worked out.

Caretaker of Lorne Field (Overlook Press)--This one's an allegorical novel, written as a mix of noir, sci-fi, and horror. A caretaker believes if he doesn't weed a field every day the world will end. Either he's insane or he knows something no one else does.

Essence (Overlook Press)--Gritty crime noir with supernatural elements. The book is placed in Brooklyn and Manhattan, with the time frame for most of the book centered around the 2004 ALCS Red Sox--Yankees playoffs, with the Yankees choke job (the worst in the history of professional sports??) seen through the eyes of a Yankees fan.

See what I mean? Add these to the film option that he just agreed to, and Dave Zeltserman is not only one of the hardest working authors around, but also one of the hottest. By the autumn of this year, "everyone" will be talking about his books in the US (at last!). Here at Kingdom Books, we're talking about them NOW.

I'll start today with BAD THOUGHTS (Thomson Gale, 2007). The action opens inside a nightmare that Bill Shannon, a cop in Cambridge, Mass., is having -- one in which he's bring forced to pick up a knife and kill someone. That's disturbing enough. But double the horror when Shannon realizes that women are being killed in exactly this way, while he endures his dreadful dreams. They date back to the death of his mother when he was just 13 years old ... Also haunting him are blackouts, perhaps linked to his own drinking, that plague his adult life. They cut in around the same time each year, the anniversary of his mother's death. Since Shannon doesn't know what he's done during his time away from himself, and his wife and best friend fail to figure it out either, the creepy suspicion among all of them is that Shannon may be the killer. Even of his mother.

It doesn't help that Shannon's therapist seems to be falling into the circle of death. And since Shannon and his fugue states are clearly getting worse, his wife Susie has about had it. Half the time she wishes he were dead; walking out of the marriage is looking attractive.

She stood frozen, staring down at him. An angry, painful sob convulsed through her body. "Weren't you supposed to be all cured? Isn't that what your therapist has been telling you?" she asked, her face turning a hard white. When Shannon remained mute in response, she exploded, "Answer me! Are you even in there?"

"Where else would I be? he said after a while.

She opened her mouth, closed it, and fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. She stood frozen in front of the mirror and then started to sob uncontrollably.

Soon isolation, terror, and a sense of crumbling from the inside beset Shannon, not a great situation from which to try to save his own life and those around him. Zeltserman combines a gritty police procedural with a carefully crafted state of horror, and a sense that the sociopathic mind of a truly dangerous criminal is creeping into each scene, each character, each weighing of risk and terror.

In other words -- this is one great read if you leave the lights on and check that the doors are locked.

More soon on SMALL CRIMES, which really got under my skin. Meanwhile, if you'd like to read an interview with Zeltersman, here's one at Murderati -- and be sure to let us know if you're coming to his event at Kingdom Books. Seating is limited, and so are the copies of books available. Contact "my" Dave (Kanell, here at Kingdom Books) directly at dknel@charter.net or 802-751-8374.

Calendar Alert: Poet Eamon Grennan, June 1, VSC

Scheduled for Monday June 1 at 8 pm at Vermont Studio Center's Lowe Lecture Hall on Main Street in Johnson, VT: poet Eamon Grennan, born in Dublin and teaching since 1974 at Vassar College. Be sure to call on that date to confirm, as the VSC often has schedule changes: 802-635-2727. We like his newest collection, THE QUICK OF IT, which appeared in Ireland in 2004 and in the United States in 2005.

Soho Crime Fest Last Night in Mass.: Garry Disher, Cara Black, Henry Chang

We left home at about 11 a.m.; we got back about 12 hours later. All this, in order to attend an author event with all of the above, plus James Benn as MC and Kate's Mystery Books as bookseller of the night, at Stellina's Restaurant in Watertown, Mass.

Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY.

I took notes like mad while the authors answered questions, panel style. Baseline info: Garry Disher, born in 1949, here thanks in part to a travel grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to Soho Books, to bring him to this side of the globe. Cara Black, born in 1951, is at home in San Francisco but flies to Paris for research for each of her Aimee LeDuc mysteries -- and recreates Paris in her mind when she's writing. Henry Chang, born in 1951 also, native to New York's Chinatown, three-quarters through the first draft for his third Jack Yu investigation. All three are among the Soho Crime authors carving out a new role for global fiction and cultural exploration, within their suspenseful mysteries.

And now, back to Garry, whose photo is above.

Garry Disher's police procedurals feature Inspector Hal Challis and his fellow investigator Sergeant Ellen Destry. Set in the Mornington Peninsula of Australia, about an hour and a half from Melbourne, they center in a region that's lush, has plenty of rain (trash that old Australia image you carry), lots of pine trees, a beautiful coastline, and wineries -- but also, said Disher last night, the doubling in size of some of the old towns of the peninsula combined with global economic issues has created social distress -- and this is what he mines as he writes. Admitting with a laugh that he inflates the murder rate in order to make better fiction -- Australia is nominally gun-free, and he says most of its murders are domestic, with either a knife or the handiest blunt object -- Disher sees his task as partly one of teasing the reader into prolonged suspense, over each book and over the series.

Writing from eight in the morning to "lunchtime" is his regular routine, and he spends the afternoons converting his longhand to typing (doing a "first edit" at the same time) and/or doing research. Usually working from a plan for each book, he places absolute trust in his instincts. And if the instincts lead him off the plan, he follows.

My favorite tidbit: He cites an Irish author as declaring each book, to be written, must have a character, a situation, and a promise.

More tomorrow on Cara Black; then Henry Chang; then I'm going to indulge in a long piece on James Benn, who held back last night in order to be a great MC, but whose new book, coming in September, features Northern Ireland and his latest insights into a long stretch of significant history.

Necessary Tension: Henry Chang's Classic Noir, YEAR OF THE DOG (2008)

Soho Crime brought out Chang's second Jack Yu book in November, YEAR OF THE DOG, and it's a solid sequel to his debut New York City-based police procedural, CHINATOWN BEAT. It opens with a short description of the characteristics of the Dog as sign for the 11th year in the 12-year repeating Chinese cycle: likeable, fearless, charismatic, the Dog endows the year with masculine characteristics of struggle, perseverance, and faith.

And there's no question that Jack Yu needs all of those, as he starts the holiday season in the Ninth Precinct, new to him, where his Chinese-ness is less part of the fabric of each day's work. At least, that was the idea. Back in the 0-5 (in CHINATOWN BEAT) he'd seen his ethnicity be both blessing and curse, as it labeled him and set him up for discriminatory treatment, while also equipping him to understand the Chinatown networks and criminal paths more readily. Probably the toughest part was the unending conflict with his friends from childhood, Tat Louie and Wing Lee. The three youths had been so close that they considered themselves blood brothers, hingdaai. (Chang uses italics for Chinese terms most of the time; he also uses them for inner thoughts of whichever character is at center stage, as well as occasionally for emphasis or for "word as word." Yes, it's a bit confusing. But bear with it -- the tale is worth reading.) Tat Louie heads up a criminal association, and his connection with Jack keeps biting the cop.

In YEAR OF THE DOG that connection finally resolves. But first the darkness and cold permeate every aspect of Jack's life, from his dead father to his strong but confused ladyfriend Alexandra to the drum roll of death and destruction beating on him. Chang crafts a classic noir thriller as he imbues the holidays -- Christmas, American New Year, Chinese New Year -- with desolation, threat, and desperation. No question, the gang life and the housing projects where it thrives foster this set of horrors. Quality of life is subzero, even when there's plenty of cash on hand from robberies and extortion. Behind the scenes is the poison of the snakeheads, too -- the criminal corporations that bring illegal immigrants to the land of plenty, then hold them captive for a lifetime through a global reach to family members trapped in China.

Chang's intense plotting is complicated by a need to provide a map to the complexity that Jack takes for granted: Chinese of various geographical and linguistic roots, who've arrived in separate waves in New York (as they have also on the West Coast; Jack and the criminals around him are still dealing with a West Coast portion of the earlier book). And in this Asian version of the Sopranos, family connections come before all else. Until they snap and backfire, of course.

Jack's first holiday deaths come from a Taiwanese family that appears to have died in a murder-suicide. In parallel, Tat Louie and his gang are suffering a string of robberies that appear to be inside jobs -- a quick way for the gang to lose face, with losses outside its control. New York is a huge city, but the Chinese populations in it are so interwoven that it's just a matter of time before Lucky Louie's problems become Jack's also.

And yet it's an unassociated and very nasty piece of violence, based securely in racism, hate, and drug use, that tears into Jack before the collision with Tat Louie can take place; he survives, but the main victim doesn't, and couldn't, considering how he was abused and beaten:

Jack didn't know if it was because of the side effects from the painkillers, but he felt sickened. He knew that this horror went on every day in this city, in America, in the world. ... Jack took a breath, closed the report. In his head he was hearing grievous groaning and sobbing, the banshee wail welling up around the sad street of funeral parlors across from the playgrounds of his youth.

Meanwhile, the dying weeks of a small-time Chinese bookie are about to coalesce into the book's rare moments of sweetness, as well as becoming the catalyst for Lucky Louie's propulsion into Jack's duty roster. Sai Go is the bookie, and he has terminal cancer. Long since isolated and without family, he has only his "business" and the people who meet his needs -- for food, haircuts, and such. Through his grief and fear, clarity emerges:

An underground life full of careless sins, chasing the dragon of good fortune. The dragon was devouring him from inside now. All part of the same evil. He was part of the trail of dirty money that travels in a circle.

By the time the firecrackers and street dancing of the Chinese New Year arrive, to mark the turn of year from Dog to Pig, Jack Yu will know a lot more about what has threatened him and the families around him. Chang offers a twist of hope at the end of the volume -- but if you've been reading carefully, you know that Jack Yu's life has just set him up for further danger and risk.

Developing a series and at the same time opening up the complexities of Asian life in New York City has taken Chang onto challenging ground. I look forward to more from this writer, and to further exploration of how he braids the danger, despair, and courage that make up policing in any congested urban area -- New York to San Francisco.

Calendar Alert: Robert Bly Poetry Reading Canceled; Donald Hall Next for St. Johnsbury Athenaeum

The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum asked us to pass along word that its first poetry event of the season, a planned reading by Robert Bly on May 29, has been canceled due to Mr. Bly's health. We wish him a sure and speedy recovery. Mark your calendar for July 1, though, when Bly's lifelong friend Donald Hall will read in St. Johnsbury. Details later.

Inspector Shan Embraces Tibet's Highest Peak in Eliot Pattison's New THE LORD OF DEATH

It had to happen eventually: Although Shan Tao Yun, mostly referred to as Shan or Inspector Shan, is Han Chinese, his loyalty in Eliot Pattison's award-winning sequence is with the Buddhist Tibetans surviving under Chinese occupation of their land and holy places. Starting with THE SKULL MANTRA (winner of an Edgar award) and continuing through WATER TOUCHING STONE, BONE MOUNTAIN, BEAUTIFUL GHOSTS, and PRAYER OF THE DRAGON, Pattison evokes the beauty and integrity of the tradition of lamas and holy men (and occasional women) of this often harsh land. Shan, in turn exiled as a criminal by the occupying force and then taken into sanctuary by his friends among the Tibetans, has deepened steadily in both his religious practices and his complex relationships. Like a concentration camp survivor, he bears a tattoo of his prisoner number. But if he can convince people to give him a chance, he soon proves his "criminal" past is in fact the best proof of his distance from the Chinese.

So in this sixth investigation, Shan at last arrives at Mount Chomolungma, the mother goddess mountain that Westerners know as Mount Everest. Selected as a corpse carrier by the local astrologer, Ama Apte, he doesn't understand why she has chosen him to retrieve the local dead from the mountain where so many Western bodies also linger. To the Chinese who watch him, he's descended into an untouchable caste by doing this. To the Tibetans, he is courting spiritual danger. And underneath all his actions is a compulsion he can't turn from: the desperate desire to rescue his son, who has been imprisoned and is in overwhelming danger at the hands of the Chinese.

Why has Ama Apte chosen Shan for the tasks of death that keep following him? Is it simply that, as she tells him, she saw something in his eyes - "You are one of those the dead speak through. The threads of your life become entwined with the dead you touch." And what is forcing the Western mountain climbers to attack the local holy places, and to lose lives in this, as well as in the climb?

Through Shan's eyes, the climbers carry death with them:

Entering the base camp below the North Col of Everest was like entering a war zone. Stacks of materiel for doing battle with the mountain lay under tarps fastened with rocks and ropes, each labeled with a trekking company name. Clusters of tents were scattered across the rocky landscape -- some elaborate, brightly colored nylon structures, others, from less well endowed expeditions, affairs of tattered canvas. Porters -- the ammunition carriers of the annual spring war -- scurried about under heavy loads, weaving in and out of small groups of climbers. The foreigners could instantly be identified as new recruits or veterans. The haggard veterans, back from the oxygen-starved, frigid upper slopes, looked as if they had come from weeks of artillery barrage. ... Two weeks earlier, Shan had seen a man writhing in agony on a stretcher, half his face dead from frostbite.

In this war zone, Shan is at risk of being not just someone's soldier but even someone's explosive ammunition, aimed against his friends and his son. His fragments of relief are small, precious, and almost entirely interior, and are necessary to the problem solving that his roles as investigator and ally require:

He sat long ..., watching the fire dwindle to ashes, driving the world from his mind the way Gendun and Lokesh had taught him. Finally he went to the lip of the high ledge and folded his hands into the diamond of the mind mudra for focus, looking over the sleeping town and the snowcapped sentinels on the horizon. After an hour he found a quiet place within. After another hour he began to let each piece of evidence enter the place, turning it, twisting it, prodding it, looking for and finally finding the one little ember that was smoldering under it all.

Pattison's language is elegant and vivid, and the relationships that he probes among the land's past and present residents, human and of spirit, are integral to Shan's investigations. Only a sound comprehension of the way his adopted compatriots think and worship can bring Shan to valid answers. Courage and stamina must root themselves in the skills of listening and paying attention -- the root skills of all investigators and all seekers for wisdom.

Calendar Alert: Sun. May 31, Robert Frost Memorial Poetry Reading with Galway Kinnell

The Old Stone House Museum in Brownington is sponsoring a Robert Frost Poetry Reading on the shore of Willoughby Lake in Westmore, VT, on Sunday afternoon, May 31, from 2 to 4 p.m. Frost and his family camped on the same spot 100 years ago this summer.

Several area poets are going to read, including Galway Kinnell, Leland Kinsey, David Budbill, Lindsay Knowlton, Jerry Johnson, and Burt Porter, who has put a couple of poems to music.

Local students who have just read Natalie Bober's A Restless Spirit, the biography of Robert Frost will be exhibiting their Frost-inspired projects, and the Willoughvale Inn will be providing refreshments.

The site is just below the Willoughvale Inn on Rt. 5A (Westmore, VT). Parking is in the Willoughvale parking lot. Follow the path down to the lake. The event is sponsored by the Old Stone House Museum.

Calendar Alert, Sun. May 24, Poetry: Kumin & Lea

Here's a heads-up from Lea Banks:

This Sunday, May 24th, at 7:30 p.m., the former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winner Maxine Kumin and award-winning poet Sydney Lea will read from their work at the Shelburne-Buckland Community Center, 53 Main Street, Shelburne Falls, MA. This extraordinary event is sponsored by the Collected Poets Series and Mocha Maya's. Suggested donation $5.00.

Maxine Kumin

Maxine's 16th poetry collection, Still To Mow, published by W. W. Norton in 2007, has just come out in paperback. Norton has also published Jack and Other New Poems and earlier collections, including Selected Poems 1960-1990. Maxine is the author of a memoir about a nearly fatal carriage-driving accident, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery, and Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poet’s Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the 2005 Harvard Arts Medal, the Robert Frost Medal in 2006, the 2008 Paterson Prize and the 2009 Paterson award for distinguished achievement. In 1981-2, Maxine Kumin served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She and her husband live on a horse farm in Warner, New Hampshire.

Sydney Lea

Author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Pain (Sarabande, 2005); Sydney's prior volume, Pursuit of a Wound (U. of Illinois, 2000) was a Pulitzer finalist, and the one before that, To the Bone, shared the 1998 Poets' Prize. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, he has also published two books of naturalist nonfiction and a novel. Sydney was founder and editor of New England Review. He has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Dartmouth, and at several European institutions. His work across four genres has appeared in sixty anthologies, and his periodical credits include the major national quarterlies, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many others. Sydney has been involved in several large conservation projects, including a 360,000 acre project in Maine and an effort to restore freshwater fish habitat in Vermont. He is also longtime vice-president of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, a forty-year-old literacy and essential skills endeavor. He lives in northern Vermont with his wife, lawyer and mediator Robin Barone. They have five grown children. He currently teaches in at Dartmouth.

For more information see www.collectedpoets.com or www.mochamayas.com or call 413-625-6702.

Update, Solstice Session at Pine Manor College

"It's the economy" -- even at summer writing sessions. Pine Manor College just reminded us:

Pine Manor College is pleased to announce the introduction of a business-of-writing seminar series, offered as part of the 5th Annual Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference, scheduled from June 22–26 in Chestnut Hill, MA.

Pine Manor College invites writers working at all levels to sign up for our business-of-writing seminars, an affordable, inspiring way to connect with fellow artists, editors, and agents. The seminars are open to registration on an “a la carte” basis for $25 per session; or sign up for all seven sessions, including the *”What Next?” session for $150. Writers interested in attending our business-of-writing seminars do not need to submit a writing sample; seminars are free to attendees of the Solstice Summer Writers Conference, but open to all interested writers.

For detailed bios of our faculty and downloadable application forms, go to: http://www.pmc.edu/solstice.

New Hampshire Poet Dudley Laufman Wins National Recognition -- For His Other Form of Meter!

Dudley Laufman of Canterbury, N.H., named National Heritage Fellow

Washington, D.C. – Dudley Laufman, a musician and barn dance caller from Canterbury, N.H., has been awarded the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts, the National Heritage Fellowship. The National Endowment for the Arts, which bestows the fellowships, announced this year’s 11 winners today.

Laufman is the third New Hampshire resident to receive the award. Contra dance musician and composer Bob McQuillen of Peterborough earned a National Heritage Fellowship in 2002, and Littleton basketmaker Newt Washburn was selected in 1987.

“I really didn’t believe it at first,” Laufman says of the honor, which comes with a $25,000 honorarium and will be celebrated with ceremonies and performances in Washington, D.C., September 21-24, with the public performance on Thursday, September 24.

At 78, Laufman has been involved in the contra dance and barn dance community in New Hampshire for over 60 years. He called his first dance in 1948 and soon started his own musical group for the dances, which later became the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. During the 1970s, the orchestra made a number of recordings, and Laufman traveled throughout the region, performing and teaching dance, averaging 300 or more engagements each year.

As longtime members of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts’ Traditional Arts and Folklife Listing, Laufman and his partner Jacqueline Laufman – the two perform together in the group Two Fiddles -- are sought after to conduct barn dance residencies in schools and at community centers.

Laufman has been the subject of a documentary film, The Other Way Back: Dancing with Dudley, and he and Jacqueline recently published “Traditional Barn Dances with Calls & Fiddling,” an instruction book that includes two music CDs and a DVD, through Human Kinetics press.

Ernest Thompson, New Hampshire resident and author of On Golden Pond, succinctly conveys Laufman’s contributions to New England dance: “I think Dudley Laufman belongs in the pantheon of genuine American artists. He belongs in Franconia Notch, the real Old Man of the Mountain.”

The other winners of the 2009 NEA National Heritage Fellowships are: the Birmingham Sunlights, an a cappella gospel group from Birmingham, Ala.; Chitresh Das, a Kathak dancer and choreographer from San Francisco; LeRoy Graber, a German-Russian willow basketmaker from Freeman, S.D.; “Queen” Ida Guillory, a zydeco musician from Dale City, Calif.; Amma D. McKen, a Yoruba Orisha singer from Brooklyn, N.Y.; Joel Nelso, a cowboy poet from Alpine, Texas; Teri Rofkar, a Tlingit weaver and basketmaker from Sitka, Alaska; Sophiline Cheam, a Cambodian classical dancer and choreographer from Long Beach, Calif.; Edwin Colón, a cuatro player from Orocovis, Puerto Rico; and Mike Seeger, a musician, cultural scholar, and advocate from Lexington, Va., who won the Bess Lomax Hawes Award for his significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.

http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/fellow.php?id=2009_06
http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/NHFIntro.php?year=2009


KINGDOM BOOKS offers some of Laufman's books of poetry: browse them here.

Contact Dudley yourself to congratulate him:
Jacqueline & Dudley Laufman
PO Box 61, Canterbury, NH 03224
603-783-4719 or 603-783-9578 (fax)
Poetry: www.WindInTheTimothyPress.com
www.laufman.org
jdlaufman@comcast.net

Calendar Alert, May 6: Poet April Bernard and Jane Austen??!

This is a calendar alert -- but also an opportunity for amazement and wonder, since April Bernard is southern Vermont's "noir" poet. I can hardly wait to discover what she's bringing for discussion in terms of that classic of the feminine, Jane Austen:

As part of the Vermont Humanities 'First Wednesdays' Series:

Prof. April Bernard (Bennington College)presents
"Powers of Persuasion"
In her final superb novel, Persuasion, Jane Austen combined social satire with profound feeling. Why does this “fairy tale for grown-ups” continue to compel readers? How does Austen hold our attention and sympathy? And finally, who are some contemporary writers who might have learned some of Austen’s lessons?

Kellogg-Hubbard Library, Montpelier
Wednesday 6 May 2009
7:00 p.m.
free and open to the public; http://www.kellogghubbard.org/ec.html

[This alert reached me through JASNA -- check out more Jane Austen events, news, and discussion at JaneAustenInVermont.wordpress.com]

Calendar Alert: June 4 -- April Ossmann's Tour Comes Home to NH...

Since April Ossmann stepped down from the helm of Alice James Books at the turn of the year, she's toured cross-country, reading from her collection ANXIOUS MUSIC (Four Way Books). Now she's bringing her poetry home to New Hampshire, with a reading at the Dartmouth College campus in June:

Thursday, June 4, 2009
7:00pm – 8:30pm

Mayer Room, Howe Library
Author Reading, Discussion & Book Signing
Hanover, NH
For directions: http://www.thehowe.org/index.php
Sample Ossmann's poetry at her web site, where the full text of "Epergne" is given -- the final lines, which continue to intrigue me, are:

What the poets have done is to give death
a soul, which I have not done not out of humility, but fear:
once death has soul, if death is the mother of beauty
what mercies or cruelties are not possible?

IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL NEWS FROM APRIL:

The Ossmann Method Poetry Workshop: Building Your Tool Kit
(“Crash Course”)
Instructor: April Ossmann

The Writer's Center
58 North Main Street
White River Jct., VT

Saturday, May 9th from1 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. OR
Tuesday, May 12th from 9:30am – 12:00pm
$45 (each date)

Learn how to think like a poetry editor! In this workshop we’ll turn the usual workshop model on its head and not only allow the poet being critiqued to speak, but to speak first and critique their own poem, discussing correlations between the criticisms s/he has for other participants’ poems and her/his own before group discussion begins. This will offer a taste of what it means to be both poet and poetry editor, a position in which it becomes easier to objectively assess your own work; to spot dull vs. energetic syntax, generic vs. original imagery and other strengths and weaknesses you may have overlooked. It also empowers the poet in the process, and engenders an unusually positive and congenial workshop atmosphere. This workshop will be both critical and generative, so the instructor will assign reading a generative exercise in advance meant to teach or improve writing skills. Participants will receive written editorial suggestions for their poem from the instructor. Pre-registration required; enrollment limited to 8. Info: (802)333-9597 or aprilossmann@hotmail.com and http://www.aprilossmann.com/
http://www.thewriterscenterwrj.com/

News from VT Poet/Playwright David Budbill

Friends,

Two events coming up in the next couple of months I wanted you to know about:

May 8: 7:00 p.m. A reading of yet another version of my new play, A SONG FOR MY FATHER, presented by Oldcastle Theatre Company, at The Bennington Station Restaurant. For more information about the play contact: oldcastletc@gmail.com For more information about and directions to the restaurant go to: http://www.benningtonstation.com/

June 11: 7:45 p.m. The Judevine Mountain Trio (William Parker, upright bass, nagawaram, douss'n-gouni, shakuhachi, dumbek; Hamid Drake, trap set and percussion; David Budbill, spoken word) performs THE FIRE OF COMPASSION: The Meaning of Jazz in Words and Music at the 14th Annual Vision Festival in New York City at Abrons Art Center, 466 Grand Street, at the Henry Street Settlement. The F train to Delancey, or the J or M trains to Essex Street or the D or B trains to Grand Street. For more information contact: http://www.visionfestival.org

Sincerely, David

Salt on the Tongue: Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's New Poet Laureate

Carol Ann Duffy grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland. At 53, she's a poet of power and controversy -- and she is Britain's new Poet Laureate, the first woman to hold the position in its 341 years. She says she wants to be known as a poet and a mother, although many a commentator has been wide-eyed in saying she is also openly a lesbian.

The New York Times announced her appointment on Saturday, saying she is "known for using a deceptively simple style to produce accessible, often mischievous poems and dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of everyday life." Her web sit is spartan -- www.carolannduffy.co.uk -- and quickly refers readers to another site, www.sheerpoetry.co.uk, which requires a subscription fee of 12 pounds in order to access the poetry and discussion of classroom opportunities. One of Duffy's poems was recently pulled out of British school curriculum because of knife violence in it (see the Guardian story).

I did find a site that offers four of her poems, although you've got to ignore a lot of advertising to open it (famouspoetsandpoem.com). There are four poems on it at present -- the one called "Stuffed" is a shocker, and "Valentine" is a delicious love poem that offers the heart as an onion: "Its scent will cling to your fingers, /cling to your knife."

Stay tuned for more hot discussion of Duffy's poems and her new position. This is going to be far from the "stiff upper lip" notion of British public faces. I'm delighted.

New from Bob Arnold and Longhouse

1. New Longhouse Titles Spring 2009 & Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky by Bob Arnold
http://www.longhousepoetry.com/hikingdown.html

Paul Celan translated by Cal Kinnear
Andy Clausen
Hanne Bramness
Bob Arnold
Dadu translated by Andrew Schelling
Stephen Lewandowski
Louise Landes Levi
Ryokan translated by Dennis Maloney

2. Bob Arnold's Hiking Down From A Hillside Sky, letterpress printed and published by Greg Joly at Bull Thistle Press in Jamaica, Vermont, has an interesting background... A page of the poety is shown above. For information and ordering:

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/hikingdown.html

Poets at Vermont Studio Center, May: Michael Harper, Eamon Grennan

April is National Poetry Month, and as it wraps up, it's great to see that the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson keeps the significance of poetry and poets thriving. I'm marking my calendar for two visiting lecturers in May:

Michael Harper (reading 5/14)
Eamon Grennan (reading 6/2)

Be sure to confirm at the web site, www.vermontstudiocenter.org, as the reading date approaches; it's also best to call the day before, to make sure there are seats available and that the readings haven't been rescheduled (802-635-2727).

Poetry Pulitzer Goes to W. S. Merwin

Here's the celebratory press release from Merwin's publisher, Copper Canyon Press:

W.S. Merwin Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Shadow of Sirius

Port Townsend, WA—W.S. Merwin has been awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book of poetry, The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press. The $10,000 cash award honors the best book of poetry published by an American during the given year. The prizes were established in 1917 as an incentive to excellence in journalism and the arts.

“It is an honor to publish William Merwin’s poetry,” Said Michael Wiegers, Executive Director of Copper Canyon Press, “and we couldn’t do it without the support of the donors and other poets who make Copper Canyon Press possible. We are thrilled by the recognition another Pulitzer brings to the organization and are pleased that we’ve been a part of William’s most recent awards. This critical recognition helps to further our mission of fostering the work of poets at every stage in their career.”

The Shadow of Sirius, which was featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS, is Merwin’s twenty-fifth book of poems. The book is divided into three sections engaging the reader in an exploration of memory’s time continuum: the first focuses on childhood, the center is written as a series of elegies to dogs, and a third centers on the later years of life. The poems comprise Merwin’s grief, pain, wonder, and awe; they are some of the most plainly biographical of his career.

A Codex

It was a late book given up for lost
again and again with its sentences

bare at last and phrases that seemed transparent
revealing what had been there the whole way

the poems of daylight after the day
lying open at last on the table

without explanation or emphasis
like sounds left when the syllables have gone

clarifying the whole grammar of waiting
not removing one question from the air

or closing the story although single lights
were beginning by then above and below

while the long twilight deepened its silence
from sapphire through opal to Athena’s iris

until shadow covered the gray pages
the comet words the book of presences

after which there was little left to say
but then it was night and everything was known

In reviewing the book, Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The most salient aspect of the Merwin mind in meditation is its tenacity to its perplexity. Nothing can interrupt it once it has located its chosen difficulty.” Library Journal notes the poems “feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom.”

Over the last fifty years, Merwin’s muse has led him beyond the formal verse of his early years to revolutionary open forms that engage a vast array of influences and possibilities. He has received nearly every major literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 and, most recently, the 2005 National Book Award for his selected poems, Migration, and the 2007 Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress for Present Company, both published by Copper Canyon Press.
[photo above by Michael Amsler]

Garry Disher's Fifth Australian Crime Novel: BLOOD MOON

What are the standards for the best crime fiction? Push that one degree further: the best international crime fiction.

Garry Disher's series unfolds on Australia's Mornington Peninsula. BLOOD MOON, released this month, is the fifth volume in the sequence, brought to US readers by Soho Crime. The jacket offers a subtitle of "An Inspector Hal Challis and Sergeant Ellen Destry Investigation." And that's the underlying issue for BLOOD MOON: how will Challis and Destry, who have paid an enormous cost before at last falling into each other's arms (two divorces and some nasty deaths), sort out their romance while working together during the high-stress vacation period when their region is overrun with partying teens, as well as the usual human conundrums of greed, envy, and lust that spark crime around them?

Disher ramps the tension very high, very quickly, with an assault on a priest, and an abused wife, and dark remnants of a previous vacation's crimes creeping out of the shadows. Inspector Challis -- Hal -- is hard-working, thoughtful, and willing to express affection. He's been through a lot, but he hasn't let it freeze his feelings. Disher paints the sweetness of the newly evident love that Hal and Ellen have, as well as the effort that Constable Scobie Sutton puts into trying to reclaim his wife from the talons of a twisted religious group that's taking her away from him and their young daughter. Scobie doesn't have Hal's instinctive grasp of how to handle things, though, and his fumbling will cost the investigative team in time and clarity.

He'd tried his hardest but she wouldn't listen. Scobie felt aggrieved, stuck between two uncomfortable forces: his boss and his wife. Neither one wanted or needed him, it seemed, yet they both held sway over him. ... He boiled inside.

Not as vivid in this volume is the sense of Australia as locale, although the battered wife is an environmental enforcement agent. Nor is there much human cost to the investigators from the violence they witness. I wish Disher had drawn out both these aspects. On the other hand, avoiding excessive gore has become one of the aspects many readers like about this series. Disher's challenge is to sustain and deepen the tensions of the volume without gore or terror. That means the pace is nuanced, the characters change quietly in small ways, and fidelity and acceptance become tools for redemption.

The political pressures and the lab delays in BLOOD MOON ring true; so does anti-women bias within the police department. The book is a good read, compelling and smoothly knit -- and if the good and bad sort out a bit more clearly than has been fashionable, the satisfactions of sleuthing and the sense of justice provide sustained appeal.

The Right Amount of Words: Savoring the Poetry of Laura Davies Foley [Coming to Kingdom Books, Sat. April 18, for our annual Poetry Party]

THE THAW

Let the April rains come in.
I am a sloping hill with new buds piercing.

So opens one of the poems in MAPPING THE FOURTH DIMENSION, the 2006 collection from Laura Davies Foley. And it's one of the gentler openings in the book, but it heads toward the final lines:

I have no skin.
My hair is gone.
The candle within draws deeper.

And that solemnity, that willingness to paint loss in its sorrows as well as its potential, rings with honesty. Wherever or whenever we'll have the chance to meet and hold our dead again, the time between now and then hurts. Foley says goodbye and "I miss you" repeatedly in this collection.

Yet each poem is as different from the others as one face is from the faces around us. The poem "Exiled," for instance, proclaims absence -- then paces through walking by a lake or through winter, and at last into summer:

And in this walking,
this movement away, I came to a clearing
and received the clearing light,
the clouds moving apart, and you,
like a footprint
filling now with sand,
and the wide shore stretching on.

It fascinates me that Foley's second collection, SYRINGA, published in 2007, seems to have overlapped the first collection in gestation time -- each book mentions the other. But SYRINGA, springing from contemplation of a wounded waterbird and from a parallel contemplation of self and spirit, gathers light in great, sweet-scented armfuls and proclaims joy and blessing from these roots. Consider "A Day":

I was watching the geese sleeping.
I was watching the one
with the broken wing.
The serene one, floating in her painful knowledge.

As Foley leads the lines through patterns and shifting light, she resolves the poem with:

The ordinary is always like that.
Always ready to reveal itself
as something other.

But it isn't other.
It's just the ordinary.
And isn't that
the extraordinary thing we come to know?

In SYRINGA there waits also the sea at dusk; a five-year-old child diving; a solstice sparrow; and moments from hospice caring. The lines are generally short, the poems a page more or less, and the images unforgettable.

It's a pleasure to open the door of Kingdom Books on Saturday April 18 at 11 a.m., so that we can gather with this poet and her careful work.

Poetry Tonight, Brattleboro, Vermont

National Poetry Month is blooming, even though in Vermont our spring is still in the very early stages! (Snow yesterday, but quick to melt; green tips of daffodils poking into the sun; I'm looking for pussywillows.)

Here's a last-minute invitation from poets Lea Banks and Wyn Cooper that promises a lot of fun:

Hey y'all...come on down/up/over/whathaveyou and have fun with Wyn and me tomorrow evening. We'll certainly be in the mood for fun and we know all each other's jokes. Cracking each other up isn't what it used to be...we want to share it. Of course there will also be poems of heartbreak, revenge, and gut-wrenching, for all you gloom and doom types...Hope to see you there...

Lea Banks and Wyn Cooper will read from their work at the Windham Wine Gallery, 30 Main Street, Brattleboro, on Thursday, April 9, at 7:00. The event is free. For more information, call 802-246-6400.

Good Marriages and Good Mysteries: Donna Leon, Alexander McCall Smith, Colin Cotterill

Many a powerful crime or espionage novel takes its dark force from both the plot's master criminal actions, and the despair of the protagonist. Alan Furst's lost and bitter Eastern Europeans, John Le Carré's George Smiley, and Michael Connelly's Bosch come to mind, as well as Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta, whose bizarre personal life makes her an irresistible victim for the psychopaths that obsess around her.

And it's easy to cast aside books with happier characters as being soft, or cozy. Happy families are all alike? Happy protagonists are sweetly dull?

I've picked Leon, McCall Smith, and Cotterill as examples of different ways to defeat this conclusion.

The "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" as a series has reached the point where Mma. Precious Ramotswe and her neighboring business owner, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, have settled into the satisfying and affectionate marriage that the two of them earned during earlier volumes. One of the charms of these books is that detective problems for Mma. Ramotswe are human in dimension, and she solves them through a combination of hard work, study, persistence, friendship, and the quiet commonsense that she's banked over the years. But McCall Smith doesn't flinch from the darkness that sometimes emerges in crime, out of the all-too-human wounds of life. And when Ramotswe and her friends notice the danger threatening them, they see roots in their own darknesses as well -- including an abusive previous marriage, for one.

Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti has little chance for sweetness in his overworked Venetian police role; even his boss is out to get him, and the criminals he confronts emerge from the humiliations of poverty, the hunger of greed, the bloody spawn of violence and sexual horrors. Brunetti risks soul damage from the bitterness and filth that keep moving into his days and nights. He also risks harming his family by taking this home with him. Leon manages to weave into this pattern an astonishly real balance of two bright, capable people willing to sacrifice short-term power for the sake of realistic love. Here are Brunetti and his wife Paola at home:

She reached out and put her hand on his arm. "I've been listening to you talk about your work, Guido, for decades, and it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are ready to kill for a lot less than the noise of a television."

After the acknowledgment of the smallness of evil's roots, Paola points out a truth of human behavior to her husband, so that they can "see" what it happening from the same vantage point. Then Guido in return compliments his wife by seeing multiple sides of her:

Paola still had her eyes closed, and he studied her profile: straight nose, perhaps too long, a faint tracing of lines around her eyes, lines he knew had been put there by humour, and just the first faint sagging of the flesh under her chin.

He thought of the kids, how tired they had been at dinner, while his eyes travelled down her body. He set his glass on the table and leaned toward her.

The willingness to embrace and trust in his private life becomes the anchor for Guido to make good choices as he pursues a criminal and comes to understand the human nastiness driving the crimes. Although he'll sacrifice a great deal to see the crime to its solution, he'll bring home a relatively clean heart.

So here's Colin Cotterill, providing a series about an elderly coroner working on disrespected remains in his confused and often corrupt city of Vientiane, Laos. It's 1978 and the "novice socialist republic" is squeezing the fun and color out of life. Dr. Siri Paiboun and his assistants, Nurse Dtui and the tongue-tied Mr. Geung, become increasingly stubborn about seeking justice for the deceased. And readers of the series know that Dr. Siri and the noodle seller Madame Daeng are waking up to an affectionate and humorous relationship that lets each of them be whole, and give wholly.

Cotterill's newest volume, THE MERRY MISOGYNIST, comes out in August from Soho Crime (bless this hard-laboring publisher bringing crime novels from so many nations to us!). That's too far away from now to offer a review or even hints at the plot. But I want to mention that Cotterill too has found a way to position the caring and trust of his characters' relationships as a counterweight to the loss and fear that a coroner's office confronts daily. No, Cotterill's series won't scare you as much as Cornwell's. But it also won't drive you to drink, in imitation of forensics pro Kay Scarpetta. In fact, if life imitates art, I expect to enjoy the partnership of my husband all the more for having enjoyed an advance read of THE MERRY MISOGYNIST.

And I'll tell you all about it, later in the summer.

Mysteries, Quick Notes: Steve Oliver's Moody, and Christopher Fowler's "Peculiar Crimes Unit"

The only way I'm ever going to get out of the backlog of books-read-but-not-yet-reviewed is to say something brief about some, then check them off the list. So here's my two cents worth:

I picked up a paperback copy of Steve Oliver's 1996 mystery MOODY GETS THE BLUES, the first in a series -- Scott Moody is a 'Nam vet, with a lot still wrong in his head, but a brand new private investigator's license and a knack for stumbling into deadly situations in 1978's West Coast (Spokane). You know the bit about not judging a book by its cover? This one has a Michael Connelly blurb on the front, which is why I grabbed it. And I laughed, groaned, and laughed more, all the way through it. It was fun. Ya know, I needed that. I'll read another by Steve Oliver any time.

Christopher Fowler's series featuring London detectives Arthur Bryant and John May ranges in time from World War I to the 1950s -- and more so in the present (see Author's Comment!). Bryant and May have completely different ideas about investigation: Bryant's tendency to rely on psychics, networks of witches, and other unusual experts gives him a leg up in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, but May doesn't always want to follow those odd pathways. Again in paperback mode, maybe because I've been on the road so much this past winter, I picked up WHITE CORRIDOR. Dave can vouch for the fact that about once per chapter in the first half of the book, I said something like, "This is so preposterous that I'm not going to finish it." But after that halfway point, you couldn't even have distracted me from the book with chocolate. I'm looking forward to some snowstorm next winter, when I'll grab it and enjoy it all over again.

Poet Wesley McNair in Plymouth, NH, April 5

Professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine, Farmington, Wesley McNair ought to be well known for his poetry, editing, even broadcasting scripts -- but he's also a quiet Maine resident with a low-key, gentle presentation of himself. So it's a treat to mention that he's reading in the Eagle Pond Authors' Series at Plymouth State University on Sunday April 5 at 3 p.m. The reading is free, and McNair will sign books afterward. Here are multiple reasons to attend:

Books of poetry: The Faces of Americans of 1853 (University of Missouri Breakthrough Series, Devins Award, 1983); The Town of No (Godine, 1989); Twelve Journeys in Maine (Limited Edition, Romulus Editions, 1992); My Brother Running (Godine, 1994); The Town of No and My Brother Running (Godine dual reprint, 1997); The Dissonant Heart (Limited Edition, Romulus Editions, 1995: poetry with photocollages by Dozier Bell); Talking in the Dark (Godine, 1998); The Faces of Americans in 1853 (Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporaries Series reissue, 2001); Fire: Poems (Godine, 2002); The Ghosts of You and Me (Godine, 2006); Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems (Godine, 2009); The Words I Chose and Maine in Season (forthcoming from Godine and Down East, respectively, in 2010).

Other books: The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader (University Press of New England, 1994); Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of the CMU Prose on Poetry Series, 2002: memoir and essays); The Maine Poets (Down East Books, 2003); A Place On Water (essays, with Bill Roorbach and Robert Kimber, Tilbury House, 2004); Contemporary Maine Fiction (Down East Books, 2005); Fire (the narrative poem alone, in a limited deluxe edition, Forehand Press, forthcoming); A Place Called Maine (Down East Books, 2008); Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Godine, 2009).

For more information and a sampling of McNair's poetry, check his web site.